


we are here now

by randomhorse



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: (i guess), Animal Death, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Canon-Typical Violence, Complex Fix-It, First Time, M/M, Mention of Past Suicide Attempt, Mildly Dubious Consent, Not Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Compliant, Not Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, Past Sexual Abuse, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Steve Rogers Recovering, Winter Soldier Trial, also, choking tw, death tw, eating disorder cw, just a good old-fashioned stucky recovery fic, mentions of torture, self harm tw, stabbing tw, suicidal thoughts cw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-26
Updated: 2018-05-15
Packaged: 2019-04-28 03:46:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 34,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14440767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/randomhorse/pseuds/randomhorse
Summary: “He was a soldier, like us,” Steve says. “He killed people, like we did, but he never had a choice. They put us on pedestals and him on trial, how is that fair? How do you fight a fight like that if not dirty?”In which Bucky is healing, but Steve is more broken than either one of them realizes.





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> This is a post-TWS Stucky recovery fic straight from 2015 - except I finished it just in time for Infinity War. Call it vintage or something. This fic is finished and will go up one chapter at a time over the next couple of days. The rating will go up eventually. I know what you're really here for. Enjoy!

 

 

_What if I don't want the monster  
to stop being a monster?_

_What if that's the only anchor I have left?_  
 _What if my sanity depends on being able to point_  
 _at the bad thing and say,_ That is the bad thing _._

 _Haven't I already lost enough time_  
_losing track of who the enemy is?_  
_I've spent half of my life not knowing the difference_

_between killing myself and fighting back._

Andrea Gibson

 

__

 

 

“You’re getting slow, old man,” Sam says.

In the split second it takes for Steve to pinpoint Sam’s tone as worried rather than teasing Sam lands another hit, one that sets Steve’s lungs ablaze and makes his bones hum with the vibration of it.

“I’m out of pract–,” is all Steve manages before Sam swings for his head and sends the ground rushing for Steve, topples the world. The sky over New York City is spinning, steel grey, getting darker. There is a single helicopter in the distance, hovering still like a bird of prey waiting to plummet.

Steve, attempting to shake the dizziness from his brain, blinks up at Sam. “You’re getting faster.” He feels the sting of a cut high on his cheek, the air colder to the wetness of blood, and suddenly breathes deeper with the pain.

Sam purses his lips and looks down at him in a way that could be saying, _Man, you’ve got issues_ , but probably says nothing at all.

“I’m glad you’re here, Sam,” Steve says, and, as expected, finds Sam’s mouth relaxing into a smile.

“Someone’s gotta kick your ass every once in a while,” Sam says, grinning. “Man, I’m sorry about your face. I just reduced your brand value by ten percent at least.”

“How long are you staying?” Steve asks, dabbing his fingertips against the wound. The skin has split where Sam’s fist hit his cheekbone, a neat laceration.

“I’m taking Bucky down to D. C. on the weekend,” Sam says. “He’s got a prep meeting with the Hawleys on Saturday.”

Steve feels his stomach knot at the mention of the lawyers, his mouth tenses, but he nods. “Good plan.”

“Let’s get your face fixed up before Stark can charge me for it,” Sam says, and reaches out a hand to Steve. Steve, far from tired but glad to get away from underneath the lowering sky, takes it gratefully.

 

 

The strangest part is this: When Steve comes down from the roof bruised and battered, Bucky is there waiting for him, and that is not something Steve thought he’d ever have to get used to. There’s no trace of concern in the way Bucky eyes him top to bottom to take in the injuries Steve sustained, let alone the precious brand of exasperation Bucky used to have for Steve alone. Anger would be a gift by now. But Bucky doesn’t tease him anymore or gets mad at him, and Steve hardly bothers with the bruises, just dabs a little iodine on the cut and waits for it to heal.

Moving to the kitchen to put away the iodine Steve feels Bucky in his peripheral vision. In socks and sweatpants Bucky moves soundlessly, retreating to the sofa in the living room corner of the loft. Steve stalls for a moment, fiddling with the bottle, watching.

The TV is running with the inevitable news channel, a grey-faced anchor and white letters on angry red announcing BREAKING, as if they’d ever do anything else these days. At least for now the Winter Soldier has fallen out of focus: when SHIELD fell, the country faced an executive vacuum. The news read like a wildlife documentary, vultures fighting over scraps of a decaying body. It's only a question of days before they refocus on Bucky, or what's left of him.

Bucky tucks his feet under, his hands hidden in the sleeves of his sweatshirt. A small part of Steve, a stubborn, selfish part, waits for something else, anything beyond a glance, but Bucky just turns his attention back to the screen.

“How’s the tide, Barnes?” Sam inquires, strolling into the kitchen behind Steve.

Bucky looks up, registers the question. He likes Sam, Steve can tell. Sam has an easiness with him Steve never quite achieved.

“The usual,” Bucky says, gesturing vaguely towards the TV.

“Anyone try to interview you while we were upstairs? Book deals? Proposals?”

Bucky shakes his head. “15 missed calls though,” he says, nodding towards the phone Steve left on the counter.

Sam huffs a laugh. “They're rolling back in for the preliminary hearing, I see.” He runs his hand over his short hair and sighs. “How are you holding up?” he asks.

“I’m okay,” Bucky responds. His eyes flicker towards Steve in the split-second before he does. It doesn’t escape Steve – his stomach jolts for a beat – and it certainly doesn’t escape Sam.

“Swell,” Sam says, but he, too, looks at Steve, a concerned crease forming between his eyebrows.

 

“Drop your shoulders,” Sam says, stepping out of the bathroom. He is rubbing his scalp dry with one of Steve’s towels, throwing Steve, who is still in his clammy sweatshirt, a towel of his own. Steve wipes his face and flinches when he finds the cut on his cheek still stinging to the touch.

Sam turns to the cupboard to file through Steve’s clothes, picking a fresh sweater. “I spoke to the Hawleys back in D. C.,” he says. “They said we had every reason to be confident about the prelim. I mean, I’m not telling you to be chill about this because I can see why you’re not. But this is a chance, yeah? No reason to be quite so tense.”

Steve nods dutifully. It’s not like he doesn’t know any of this. He remembers Catherine Hawley telling him with all the cautious phrasing customary to her trade that the preliminary hearing meant there still was the chance Bucky wouldn’t have to stand trial at all, that the state might see sense and rule Bucky a victim of HYDRA’s crimes rather than a perpetrator.

“Let’s be real, Steve,” Sam says, his head emerging from Steve’s sweater, “if anyone can get him out of this untried, it’s them. They scare _me_ , and I’m on _their_ team.”

Steve almost smiles.

Bess and Catherine Hawley have all the fierceness and conviction Steve was looking for in an attorney, sisters from the Bronx with a shared life story not less unlikely than Bucky’s or Steve’s, perhaps minus the superpowers. They are short, smart, black, and utterly fearless. They are also the only attorneys he could find willing to fight Bucky’s fight on Steve’s terms, which wasn’t even _terms_ , plural, at all. Just the one. Just the truth.

Waiting for Sam to get dressed, Steve idly picks up Sam’s tablet, unlocking it with a swipe of his finger. News alerts are pouring in by the hour. He tries to keep track, it can’t hurt to know what the public knows, or thinks it knows.

Steve hesitates when instead of a news website the screen lights up to what looks like a collection of blueprints, a mission plan unfamiliar to him. His finger hovers over the minimize button for a moment before he swipes right to flick through it. It takes only seconds for him to understand that Natasha’s tireless work has washed another HYDRA base to their shore, out in the forests extending beyond Omsk, just miles from the Russian-Kazakh border. It’s a development that sinks in uncomfortably, especially given the fact that up until now Steve had no idea Natasha was even still looking.

He holds the tablet in his lap and waits until Sam turns around, until Sam’s eyes drop to the device in Steve’s hands and his expression shifts.

“Ah,” Sam says.

“Were you going to tell me about this?” Steve asks.

“We’re not sure if it really is anything,” Sam says. His voice is level, calm, but it doesn’t escape Steve that he hasn’t answered the question, and instead has moved his stance into a slightly more defensive position.

“If he’s been kept there at all it’s worth our while,” Steve says. “You know that.”

“Absolutely,” Sam says. He sounds sincere about it. He has dropped his hands, Steve’s towel still in them. “But you know we need Hill to greenlight this to get the necessary equipment, and so far she’s not convinced.”

Sam is steady under Steve’s gaze, which is more than most people Steve knows would be able to pull off. Not just that, his expression remains open, approachable, without a shadow of deception – or guilt.

“According to Nat’s deep background it was a tent pole, but there's no way of confirming that yet,” Sam continues. “We didn’t want to get your hopes up before we heard back from HQ.”

Steve nods and tries for gratitude, but he can’t shake the familiar nagging sensation in his gut. He knows the feeling from ages ago, from when he was smaller: the feeling of having been benched for a fight that should have been his, of being sidelined as a form of protection he never asked for.

He picks up the tablet again to examine the map more closely. Red dots mark the designated drop-offs for two operatives on opposite sides of the complex.

“So it’s you and Nat, yeah?” Steve asks, trying to match Sam’s sober all-business sort of tone.

Sam nods curtly.

“Are you sure it’s abandoned? A third man would be a good idea given the terrain,” Steve weighs in, flipping through the other blueprints that focus in more detail on the different levels of the building.

“Nat is mobilizing Clint,” Sam says. “We’re good, Steve.”

“I’m just saying,” Steve says.

“I know what you’re saying,” Sam responds. “And I’ll talk to Hill if you want me to, but you know where she stands on your priorities and frankly she’s got a point.”

Steve sets his jaw. It’s not like he doesn’t understand Hill’s reservation. All of her equipment still bears SHIELD seals after all and the press is circling Steve like wolves. Any misstep would be excuse enough to tear him apart. Steve on the other hand, being reduced to walking circles in the flat and sparring on the rooftop with no real stakes, feels a tenseness growing in his chest like a cancer that’s making it progressively harder to breathe.

“I just want to do _something_ ,” Steve says.

“I know, Steve,” Sam says gently. “It’s tough, just standing by, I know the feeling. But I’m telling you, you’re doing a great deal.” Sam pauses, and, nodding towards the closed door leading to the living room, adds, “For him.”

Steve finally drops his shoulders, disarmed. His gaze involuntarily follows Sam’s to the door. He can almost picture Bucky behind it, on the couch, slouching, focused on the TV, some strands of his hair still tucked into the collar of his sweatshirt.

He knows Sam means well but Sam is also a terrible liar.

“He doesn't even talk to me.” The words tumble out before Steve can stop them, having burned on this tongue for weeks. His tone is harsher than he expected, his throat tight.

“Still?” Sam asks. His voice is calm, but he sounds on guard nonetheless.

“He talks to you, right?” Steve finds himself asking. “Is he okay?”

“You know I can’t tell you what he says,” Sam says, gently, his expression changing into something too close to pity for Steve to bear.

Steve turns away from Sam, walks over to the window for lack of better options. They have been over this, Steve knows the rules. First and foremost he promised to leave Bucky with a choice. It sounded so easy back when Bucky was still in psychiatric care and Steve, despite the horrors he found in the Winter Soldier’s file, was naively convinced Bucky had come back for him. It’s so much harder now. Steve has never known Bucky this quiet.

“I get it,” Steve says. Swallows the lump in his throat. “I’m glad he talks at all.”

“He's still not initiating,” Sam concludes.

Steve shakes his head, inches closer to the glass. It exudes a chilling, calming coolness. When he looks down, Steve can see the yellow cabs racing in the street, people, tiny, hurrying along the pavement, tinted orange already by the streetlights. His breath leaves a blurry spot on the thick wall of security glass separating him from the edge. It’s going to be winter soon.

It wouldn’t be so bad if Steve couldn’t see Bucky’s brain working behind his eyes, if he couldn’t see him clenching his fists and jaw triggered by a thought, a memory resurfacing. If Bucky didn’t jerk awake at night in the other room, panting, and calmed down again silently, going back to bed sweat-drenched, and always alone. Steve remembers this feeling vividly, the sensation of reaching out, down, hoping to catch Bucky, and finding nothing but thin air instead. It wouldn’t be so bad, a little voice in the back of his head goes, if he didn’t know Bucky has chosen the confidence of others over Steve’s own.

“Are you making progress at all?” Sam asks.

“He’s settled in,” Steve says, avoiding the part of the question that extends on him as well. There is a certain inevitability about the way they swung back together since Bucky walked into a D. C. police station on a bright September afternoon, malnourished but unarmed. Like pendulums with tangled strings they can only be kept apart for so long. But everything about the way they used to be has changed. Steve doesn’t know how to hold himself in Bucky’s presence anymore, can’t do much besides rolling his shoulders in, making himself look smaller, non-threatening.

“At least he trusts you,” Steve says, meaning to sound sober about it, but he doesn’t quite manage to keep the bitterness out of his voice, and the _you_ especially.

“You were always going to be the exception there,” Sam says carefully. Steve feels him move in his back, braces his shoulders for a comforting touch, but Sam keeps his distance. “With the role you’ve played for him, in his past and now, Steve, you’ve got to understand that he approaches you differently.”

Steve nods curtly. “I get it.” He knows trauma twists people into different shapes, he himself has been twisted, hardly recognizes himself sometimes. His barriers are paper-thin these days, ready to crumble to the touch.

“You don’t have to do this alone, you know,” Sam says to his back. “You don’t have to do any of this alone.”

“I got this,” Steve tries to say, but he can’t find the voice for it. Instead, he draws a deep breath and closes his eyes for a moment, swallows the absurd urge to cry.

“I’m just saying, man,” Sam presses gently, “I’m not saying you ain’t got this, I’m just saying that if you’re lost with this, no-one’s gonna blame you if you seek help.”

Steve takes a step back from the glass, severing the mild pull of vertigo.

“I got this,” he repeats, steadier now, turning around to Sam. He tries his best to force his face into the stern mask people recognize as Captain America, determined jaw and eyebrows, and if he’s not convincing at least now he sounds forceful enough for Sam to understand that he’s going to stand by this lie no matter what.

Sam nods, resigned, and gives Steve’s shoulder a short, reassuring squeeze. When he leaves that night, he takes the concerned crease between his eyebrows with him.

 

 

Steve mechanically reaches out in the dark for the glowing rectangle of his phone, buzzing alive with yet another news alert. The intervals slow down past midnight but the American crisis is global news, it doesn’t adhere to time zones.

Steve swipes the Telegraph’s article on US anti-terror efforts off his screen and rolls onto his back, closes his burning eyes. Ever since the serum he has found it hard to rest, he feels it running through his bloodstream like a constant adrenaline high. Since the ice, falling asleep has been harder still, with the cold reaching out for his gut every time he closed his eyes. Since D. C. he hardly sleeps at all. Every alert on his phone comes with a fresh jolt of panic.

After D. C. Steve has been issued accommodation in New York City he would blush seeing the price-tag of, which is why Stark makes sure he never does. The decoration is modern, Stark calls it efficient, Steve would describe it as clinical. His bedroom is never fully dark. The smog carries the glow of the city up to his full-length windows, orange and toxic, the system Stark installed – intercom, sound system, security monitor – ever-present at night with the blue glow of its touchpads.

Steve can hear Bucky breathe in the next room over, rugged and fast, on the edge of a nightmare, and swallows the urge to get up and check on him, reminds himself that’s not how they are anymore. Their space is not crowded now like their Brooklyn flat used to be, always too small for the two of them, for Bucky’s restless limbs and Steve’s big ideas. This place is big enough for Bucky and him to draw their own circles, hardly ever crossing.

The problem is Steve’s brain won’t quiet down no matter how he exhausts himself sparring. He is still too aware of his own body for meditation, and his metabolism burns any medication with superhuman speed. Sam has joked about horse tranquilizers, the kind you administer with blow darts, and Steve remembers laughing. Steve remembers the short, bright space of days after they met and before Bucky returned like something out of a different life. Sometimes he thinks about how Sam’s life must have changed just as much as his own afterwards. Above all else, Sam has been _there_ , a warm, comforting gravitational center to his life, not demanding anything in return, which is more than Steve could ever have asked of him. Steve has never thanked him, couldn’t ever thank him enough.

The phone next to him buzzes again, sliding on the mattress. Steve feels the vibration in his teeth, presses his eyes shut for a second before he opens them to the blinding light of the display.

The notification clocks in at 08:03. Somewhere along the line Steve must’ve slipped into sleep without even noticing. He slides his thumb to the right and the screen opens up to the familiar bright yellow of the Daily Bugle’s opinion resort. Steve knows their track record well. Back when Bucky was still in custody Natasha and Sam kept tally marks on the sides the papers were taking.

Steve finally blinks fully awake, twists his body into an upright position against the headboard of his bed. He scrolls down with numb fingers, half hoping for another think piece on the fragility of the American power complex, panic already stirring at the base of his spine.

 

_BARNES SPOTTED IN ROGERS' MANHATTAN APT_

the headline reads, black font on yellow ground. A picture sprawls across the screen below. It takes a second for Steve to reconcile the strange angle with the flat he knows: it's taken from outside their full-length windows, it's their living room, their kitchen set on the far right end. He recognizes his own still unfamiliar shape in the back, cutting something at the kitchen counter. On the sofa, his unmistakably gleaming arm angled towards the camera, sits Bucky, in sweatpants and a t-shirt, transfixed by the TV. _Is this man James Buchanan Barnes?_ , the caption asks.

The phone vibrates again in Steve's hands, it sends a shock through his spine. He can't breathe. How did they find them? Another notification:

_ROGERS AND BARNES LIVING TOGETHER?_

And another.

_HAS CAPTAIN AMERICA FORSAKEN US?_

Steve presses his eyes shut. He forces himself to take deep gulps of air, forces his hands to be steady. He breathes deep. He selects the settings and turns off the news alert. He goes into his contacts. Sam is first on his list.

 

 

 

 


	2. Two

 

 

_THE BARNES IDENTITY_

_by Christine Everhart_

_It was perhaps the most outrageous transformation ever witnessed in a court of law: on October 1st 2015, the day of his bond hearing, the Winter Soldier entered the stand a wanted terrorist and left it a war hero, a famously dead one at that, the name of a legend attached like a fresh name tag: James Buchanan Barnes, free on bail until his trial. Barnes hasn't been seen in public since. Where is he now? It seems innocent enough a question to ask almost to the day a month later, with exactly a week to go until Barnes' preliminary hearing. The shocking answer, however, is currently causing a worldwide outrage, prompted by a single photograph. Why? Because we, the American people, have been conditioned for more than half a century to not ask questions about James Buchanan Barnes._

 

“This is the worst I've found so far,” Steve says. He holds the tablet out to Sam and points at the screen.

Sam looks at him, questioning, but takes the tablet from his hands anyways.

“ _The Barnes Identity_ ,” Sam reads. “Cheeky.”

 

_Plot 7A-125 on Arlington Cemetery, the one that bears Barnes' name and has become a place of pilgrimage for Captain America aficionados, is famously empty, but where James Barnes truly found his final rest has never been closely examined. At the time there were more pressing matters at hand: a war to be won and then, only weeks after Barnes' own demise, the heroic sacrifice of Captain America – the man born to outshine him both in life and in death. For centuries afterwards Barnes was a legend that profited from a certain haziness in the details, a compelling soft focus. Captain America's close associate, his right-hand man, his shadow. That is why a photo like the one above stirs us so: In its intimacy it touches upon where we may have been suspending our disbelief. Barnes is no longer the image of a dapper young man on a VA postcard. He is no longer the teenage sidekick to an angle-jawed comic book character. He is no longer a contained fantasy, he is real, and more: he is a damaged man, possibly dangerous, and by inviting him into his home Steve Rogers has invited him into ours, too. Where has Barnes been? What else has he done? It feels cruel to ask for the blanks to be filled when it are precisely those blanks that will turn a man we called our hero into a terrorist and mass murderer._

 

“Jesus,” Sam says, whistling through his teeth. “She's not taking prisoners, is she?”

“It gets worse _,”_ Steve says, scrolling through the block of text, and points to a passage further down.

 

_All of us are affected by what we have been told about Barnes in our youth and what we have learned now – but Captain America perhaps has it worst of all. The question whether Steve Rogers remains unbiased in this affair no longer beckons an answer._

_Since Rogers’ brain was unfrozen from Arctic permafrost two years ago, he has had not only the Battle of New York to deal with. The shell-shock of World War II must still be vivid in his mind, as well as the trauma of being violently torn from his familiar surroundings. Desolate in a century he was not built for he encounters a man who bears a haunting semblance to his childhood friend, his closest companion on the battlefield, the man he still, despite the decades that have passed, affectionately calls “Bucky”._

_To a mind like Rogers’, weakened by years of emotional turmoil unimaginable to the likes of us, finding Barnes alive over seventy years after he saw him fall to his death likely makes sense. And can we blame Rogers for seeking solace at least in the illusion of a friendship he deemed long lost? With justice on the line, it falls to us to remember how easily a grieving heart is fooled by a comforting narrative, and that loss can turn even the best of men into a dangerous liability._

_When the Winter Soldier files, held up as irrefutable proof of the Barnes Theory, were dropped online at the pivotal moment of the Winter Soldier's attack by an as of yet unnamed whistleblower, we were quick to call it a coincidence – perhaps because the files provided a narrative, a sort of love story no less, to an otherwise unfathomable act of cruelty. We latched on to Rogers' story, starved for hope and happy endings. We accepted his testimony for truth and we did not ask questions – just like we were taught. The questions we should be asking, however, are as pressing as they are simple: Can we still trust Rogers? Were we ever right to trust Barnes? And how strange can we allow the truth to be before we must expose it to the suspicion of being fiction?_

 

Sam looks up. “Is she saying what I think she's saying?”

“She goes on about how there's no real evidence to support his claim. Or mine.” He takes a deep breath. “And she's right, if the files get thrown out it's all fucking circumstantial.”

“Well, shit,” Sam says. “I wonder if the prosecution has a vacancy for her.”

Steve picks up the tablet, scrolls a little further down to the number of shares, framed blue, already in the thousands. He refreshes the page and watches it jump each time he presses the button, growing rapidly. It can’t be more than two hours since the photo was published, and Steve’s phone won’t stop buzzing with new features following a similar vein, reporting, quoting, digesting.

Sam gently takes the tablet from him. There are hairline cracks in the screen when Steve lets go.

“Should’ve known better than to trust you with anything but print,” Sam dead-pans, and Steve almost laughs.

“Do we know who tipped them off?” Sam asks, scrolling back up to the title, and the photograph. The oddest part is how they look peaceful from the outside, domestic, when in truth they are anything but.

Steve shakes his head. “We should though,” he says.

A restlessness has taken over his body that doesn’t compare to the itch of idleness he felt before. He feels it burning through his veins, rushing through his system. He remembers the feeling vividly from the battlefield, it came with flak on the horizon, dull vibrations in the ground indicating bombs dropping in the distance. After he has spent more than one lifetime suppressing it, flight instinct still comes naturally to him.

“Are you okay?” Sam asks, looking at him.

Steve knows better than to dig for the answer to the question. Instead he prioritizes the impulses rushing through his brain, the ones directed at his own safety coming last, always. His eyes flicker over to the door behind which Bucky is still, finally, blissfully asleep. He feels a sudden pang of panic in the pit of his stomach, ice-cold and burning, when he thinks of Bucky waking up to this new mess. He stands up and walks over to the blue touchpad of Stark's security system, hits the buttons randomly until the blinds start soundlessly crawling down the windows.

“You know he still stands a fair chance,” Sam says. The crease between his eyebrows has impossibly deepened. “Even if they're not buying into the whole identity thing. Even if they're not buying _you_. He was a prisoner of war for a considerable time, he could always get off by reasons of insanity. It's a viable option, even if you don't like it.”

“It’s not the truth,” Steve says.

Sam sighs, and says nothing, and Steve knows it’s because he knows better than to start this fight. They have been having it for weeks now, it’s the one common denominator between Steve’s allies and his enemies.

“The truth doesn’t win court cases,” he remembers Stark saying before the Hawleys fed Bucky's name to the press, “money does.” And Steve vividly remembers holding back the punch, because what Stark deserved after paying the Hawleys to bail Bucky out was gratitude, and not a good shiner. It had been a close call, though. Fact is that the press lapped the Bucky Barnes story up, and the jurisdiction set Bucky free until the trial, and people pitied him and clamored for his acquittal. So far the truth has paid off.

“She hasn't changed your mind, has she?” Steve asks, his mouth dry. He watches Sam closely, intent on registering any shift in his expression, any hint of doubt.

Sam’s face is stern in a way Steve can’t remember ever having seen before. “You know I trust you,” Sam says.

“I’d know him anywhere,” Steve says. It’s a truth so deeply ingrained it doesn’t even need thinking. “I’d know him blind. He didn't do it, he had no control.”

“Then we’ve got only the world to convince,” Sam says in a tone that puts an end to any discussion.

Steve looks down at the tablet between them, words like venom suspended over the entire world in the blink of an eye, and spreading on steadily with each hour that passes, and then at Sam, who keeps his distance, hovers just outside his personal space, waiting only for an invitation. Sam, who’s been there as a constant, and who now wears a kind of determination on his face that reassures Steve more than words ever could. These are the waves crashing in after Steve has seen them build for months at the horizon and suddenly going under is almost a relief. For the first time in weeks he feels purpose, and a sense of calm with it.

Steve sets his jaw. “We’re going to Russia tonight,” he says.

 

 

Bucky examines the blueprint on Sam’s tablet for a long time. Finally he nods. “I was there,” he says.

Steve watches him across the table as he passes the tablet back to Sam. “They sent me there for debriefs,” Bucky continues. “Between missions.”

“Did they perform any medical procedures on you there?” Maria Hill’s voice asks from the conference phone in the center of the table.

Natasha next to Steve is tense like a wire about to snap. He can feel her leg bobbing restlessly under the table. Bucky looks down at his hands.

“I'm not sure,” he says. “But they had basic equipment everywhere for,” he hesitates just slightly, “correctional purposes.”

“You mean they tortured you?” Hill presses. “Did they freeze you, too?”

“Christ, Maria,” Natasha hisses.

“We need to know what we’re looking for,” Hill says. Steve looks at Sam, who is listening quietly, leaning back in his seat, and back to Bucky, who has his hands folded in front of him, the bulk of his weight leaning on his elbows.

“Kryo tech won't do,” Steve says. “We need original paperwork. DNA samples. Medical records. Anything that proves without a doubt what they could do. What they _did_ do.” He swallows. “We need to dig for the old stuff. Verify Zola's notes. He knew Bucky before.”

Bucky looks up at Steve. His brows are knitted but his eyes are almost soft. Steve’s hands are cold like ice, resting heavily on top of the table. The first shock has sunken in heavy and dull in his gut, and with it the sense of calm has passed. Part of his brain is whirring in overdrive. The rest of him, his stomach, his lungs, seem to be stalling. His insides feel raw, his skin too tight. Steve hurries to focus on the conference phone instead.

“Maria?”

“Rogers is right,” Hill says. “The Winter Soldier files won’t hold up now, not with that amount of public backlash against them. Without physical, conclusive evidence they’ll tear us apart.”

The _us_ settles deeply in Steve’s stomach, warm against the tenseness of his gut.

“It'll take us two days to fly a squad into Russia and back, and that's not counting the time you're gonna need to extract intel.” Hill's voice sounds flat over the conference phone. “That's a pretty tight schedule with the prelim coming up.”

“Right now it looks like we'll be prepping for the long run anyways,” Natasha says. “How long would it take you to get us airborne?”

Hill sighs. This is her last reservation breaking, Steve can feel it.

“We can have a Quinjet ready in an hour, two hours tops, pick you up at Stark’s,” Hill says. “If we get you in the air before noon you’ll be dropped off outside Omsk just after midnight. Forecast says overcast sky, moon in the last quarter. Ideal conditions.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Steve can see the edge of Natasha's mouth twitch into a smile, and silently nods his appreciation towards her.

“We’re all set around here,” Natasha says. “Transfer to Stark’s won’t take us longer than twenty minutes.”

“Did you brief Barton on the mission?” Hill asks.

Natasha nods. “He’s informed and, I quote, ready whenever.”

“That's it, then,” Hill says. “Barton, Romanoff and Wilson dispatched to Omsk. Rogers, Barnes, you stay put.”

Steve moves to protest, but Hill shuts him down before he can even open his mouth. “That’s non-negotiable,” she says. “We can’t use any more bad press, and if you leave this flat now there’s going to be more pictures, if not worse. We can't have the public see you frolicking around Russia, not right now.”

Steve falls back in his chair, his lungs deflating.

Involuntarily, his gaze wanders back to Bucky. He’s looking down at his fingers, flesh and metal intertwined. Steve couldn’t for the life of him tell what is going on in Bucky’s head and that, maybe, is the strangest thing about how they are now.

 

 

Once the meeting is adjourned the waiting game begins. Clint is stuck in traffic as soon as he steps out of the door of his apartment, and Hill is setting heaven and hell in motion to get a Quinjet in the air and bound for New York before noon. Sam and Bucky retreat to the kitchen, talking lowly among each other.

Natasha drops a mug of steaming hot beverage in front of Steve.

“Blinds are your friends,” she says, and when he gives her a blank look, she nods towards the full-length windows. “Drones are a thing, you know. Any kid can fly them these days.”

“How did they know where to look?” Steve asks.

“You are a literal beacon, Steve,” Natasha explains indignantly. “I’m not sure there’s anyone in the U.S. who is easier to locate right now, with exception maybe of the President and Tony ‘my name is on top of my building’ Stark. Doesn’t help that he’s paying your bills, though.” There’s an uncharacteristic edge to Natasha, uncharacteristic because while Natasha isn’t usually unaffected she’s usually better at hiding it.

“Blinds it is, then,” Steve says, although he can already feel his gut tighten at the prospect of going from hiding out in the flat to literal lockdown.

“You’ll be alright though, won’t you?” Natasha adds, softer. She leans her hip against the table, casually turned towards Steve, her arms crossed and her fingers tapping, as if he was holding her up from things of much bigger importance.

Steve closes his fingers around the mug.

“You can talk, Steve,” Natasha says, and that’s as much an invitation to share as he’ll ever get from her.

“I really don’t care as long as he’s safe,” Steve says, and finds honesty tasting strange on his tongue. He has changed, he’s not the boy who wore his heart on his sleeve anymore, he doesn’t know when that happened.

A smile curls the outer edges of Natasha’s mouth, quick enough to miss, and is replaced by her usual neutral expression before he can put his finger on it.

“I’m trying, Nat,” he adds while he’s at it. “I’m trying so hard here, and I’m not sure I’m making a difference at all.”

Natasha doesn’t oblige him with a reassuring response, that’s the difference between Sam and her. She doesn’t tell comforting lies.

“He’s still here, so that’s one thing,” she says.

When Steve frowns, she continues. “He doesn’t have allegiances anymore, he doesn’t have responsibility towards anyone but himself, not even towards you. So if he’s decided to stay that has to count for something.”

“Thanks, Nat,” Steve says, and genuinely means it. Steve knows Natasha understands Bucky where he and Sam, being soldiers first and foremost, fall short. Natasha understands what it means to be a victim, what it means to be stripped of everything that constitutes identity. She knows what it’s like to come back from that when Steve can only ever imagine the worst and not even scratch the surface in the process.

“Take care of him,” she says. Her eyes flicker over to the kitchen where Steve can hear Sam and Bucky talk quietly. Steve would almost think she sounds worried, but this being Natasha Romanoff, _concerned_ is probably a more fitting attribute.

“I will,” Steve says.

 

 

Sam corners Steve in the hallway, already zipped up in tactical gear, a gun strapped heavy to his thigh. Steve doesn’t ask which sort of ammunition it holds.

“Lookin’ ready,” Steve says, trying to lighten the mood. The words come out wrong. He has never been good at keeping up the pretense of levity when in truth his insides are so tightly wound he is afraid he might snap any moment.

“There is no reason to worry about us,” Sam says. He says it intently, seeing right past Steve's poor show of confidence.

Steve nods against the lump in his throat, puts on a brave face, and Sam reaches out and hugs him tight. It presses the air from Steve’s lungs, and along with it some of the tenseness.

“We’ll be back in no time,” Sam says, and Steve decides to believe him.

When he lets go, Sam cracks half a smile. “Sit tight. Don’t do anything stupid while we’re gone.”

“You know me,” Steve says.

“That's exactly why I'm telling you,” Sam says. There's something past the joke in his eyes, and the crease has reappeared. Steve huffs the vague equivalent of a laugh anyways.

“Promise,” Sam demands, and he is fully serious now.

“I promise,” Steve says. It takes that for Sam to turn his back, shoulder his gear and leave. Steve watches Natasha and him walk down the corridor, synced, until the elevator’s closing doors hide them from his view.

 

 

Steve starts packing the instant they’re out of sight. It’s mechanical, almost. _Precaution_ , he tells himself, and catches himself pocketing the keys to the van he doesn’t use and that he knows to be parked on the parking deck in the basement. It’s keeping his hands busy, he tells himself, and sketches out the layout of the parking deck in his mind, screening for blind spots. In his defense, tactics is all he’s ever known by means of self-preservation.

That’s how Bucky finds him eventually, in his bedroom, two black duffle bags opened on the bed, both packed with a stack of t-shirts, jeans, a towel.

Bucky frowns when he sees the bags.

“Precaution,” Steve says automatically, echoing his own thoughts, splitting the contents of his sock drawer between the bags.

“Are we running?” Bucky asks.

Steve stops in his tracks, a pair of socks in each hand. Bucky is leaning against the door frame, his hands hidden in the pockets of his sweatpants. There’s no change about him, his posture, his energy, nothing to indicate why he’d be responding to Steve now, after he hasn’t for almost a month.

“Buck –” Steve starts.

“You never ran,” Bucky says. He’s watching Steve intently.

“I know,” Steve says. Bucky’s _we_ is still fluttering in his chest. He stalls for a moment, the socks still in his hands, not ready to turn away again to put them into the bag. “I should’ve started ages ago.”

There’s a moment of stillness between them, a moment of truce, almost, although they haven’t been fighting. They’ve been turning each other end for end, sizing each other up, assessing the situation. Steve feels like they’re only really looking at each other for the first time now.

“Do you want to get out, Buck?” Steve asks.

The balance lasts only for a couple of seconds, suspended between them, before Bucky turns around and walks out of the room. Steve hesitates for a beat, then follows Bucky to the kitchen. He finds Bucky at the cutlery drawer, hiding a knife in the back of his waistband.

“They’ll be downstairs,” Bucky says. “Waiting.”

Then he turns around to Steve, his gaze unguarded, open. It takes that for Steve to understand, finally, that Bucky’s fate is just one more thing resting on his shoulders now, one more thing at the mercy of the shots he calls.

Just like that, it’s decided.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's a teaser for chapter three:
> 
> _There is less pain that Steve would've thought, but more blood._


	3. Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note I bumped up the rating for this chapter (for violence). There's talk abt suicidal ideation in this chapter as well as some of the upcoming ones. I added trigger warnings in the tags! Be safe, pals.

 

 

Steve’s face looks like a mask in the elevator’s mirrored surfaces, white and ghost-like. Bucky leans his back against the wall, one of the duffle bags between his feet. His eyes are alert, his hands steady at his sides. Steve feels the pull of the elevator dropping several levels a second deeply in his gut. Running is different. He tries to settle his stance around the newness of the feeling, it’s uncomfortable still like borrowed boots.

“We’re not fighting,” Steve says, because he knows the knife weighs heavy in the back of Bucky’s waistband. “But we’re not stopping for anyone.”

Bucky’s face is blank, but he nods.

 

 

The parking deck is bright with fluorescent light. They move quickly, each carrying one of the bags. Steve scans the deck routinely for movement, stray shadows. Behind his double glass window next to the elevator exit the security guard on duty is reading a magazine.

Steve can feel the gravitational force of Bucky’s weight in his back when they walk down the row of cars, a connection older than this century, deeper than instinct. They move in unison, Bucky following without Steve having to look back.

Then the intercom crackles alive with a shrill, dry sound that makes every hair on Steve’s body stand on end.

“I’m going to have to ask you to stop, Mr. Rogers,” the security guard’s voice comes over the speakers, and Steve can feel his heart speed up. It was naive to believe even just for a second that they would let him leave unchecked, not with Bucky by his side. He keeps walking steadily down the row of cars, to where he knows the van is parked near the exit.

“Mr. Rogers,” the security guard repeats. Steve doesn’t turn around. He hears a door go and steps approaching and walks faster, grips the handle of his duffle bag tighter.

He only stops when he has reached the van. Bucky slows behind him, and so do the steps of the security officer.

“Put the bag down and turn around, Mr. Rogers,” the security guard says.

“Get in the car, Buck,” Steve says quietly, and Bucky drifts away from him, and around the car to the shotgun door. When Bucky is out of any potential line of fire, Steve turns around.

The security guard is a short man, hair graying at the temples, but Steve doesn’t make the mistake to take that for weakness. His eyes are awake, glimmering, his body tense. Oddly, he’s smiling. Steve is sure that what he lacks in strength and weight he makes up easily in speed and ruthlessness.

The guard doesn’t have his gun drawn but his hand rests on the handle, and with a routine motion he opens the fastening on the holster.

“I have direct order to stop you from getting into that car, Mr. Rogers,” he says. There’s something about his voice that makes Steve’s skin crawl, something about the superiority with which he says it. Steve can’t see Bucky through the blackened windows of the car, realizes too late he left the shield up in the apartment. He balls his fists around the emptiness.

“Oh yeah?” he says. “Order from whom?”

“Put your hands on top of the vehicle, Mr. Rogers,” the security guard says.

Instead, Steve drops the duffle bag, taking a decisive step forwards.

Once the balance tips, everything unravels in the space of seconds.

The security guard raises his weapon and in the same instant Bucky is on him in a blur of black and silver. A shot fires into concrete and Steve goes down, he feels the vibration humming under his palms, the floor ripped open only inches from where he fell. Bucky and the security guard hit the ground in a tangle, the gun slides from their struggling grasp and across the smooth floor of the garage, circling around itself, until it comes to rest under one of the cars, out of all of their reach.

The security guard grapples for the walkie-talkie on his belt, and instantly Bucky’s metal hand is on his, closing firmly and mercilessly around it, crushing bones around the plastic device. Bucky rips the walkie-talkie from the security guard’s belt and hauls it away from them. It comes to rest on the concrete floor several feet away, shattered. Howling, his broken left hand useless at his side, the security guard reaches around Bucky’s back with his right, searching purchase, trying to pull him off, and finds the handle of Steve’s kitchen knife sticking out from the waistband of Bucky’s sweatpants instead.

Steve’s movements feel remote controlled, guided by instinct more than anything. He lunges himself at the pair, knocking Bucky off the security guard with his full weight. Bucky rolls to the side, finding his balance again instantly, ready to attack, his stance taut like a predator’s. Pinning the security guard to the ground, Steve finds a second to look at Bucky. There’s a long sash in the side of his sweater where the knife caught him rolling off the guard, and there’s blood with it.

“I got him,” Steve yells to Bucky. “Stand back.” The guard is under him, arms pressed into the concrete by the weight of Steve’s body. Steve’s hands find the security guard’s neck, and, closing them slowly and tightly, he brings his face down close enough to whisper. “Who’s giving you orders?” he asks.

The security guard struggles under him, kicking, wheezing, but doesn’t say a word. Steve closes his grip tighter and the guard’s eyes bulge.

“Who’s giving you orders?” he repeats. “Is it Rumlow?”

The security guard gapes and spits, his face turning purple, his limbs twitching against Steve’s.

“Please,” the security guard coughs, and Steve shifts his weight to rest heavier on his hands on the guard’s neck. _This is easy_ , Steve thinks, and wonders briefly when killing started to come so naturally to him.

Under him, the security guard’s right, unharmed hand slips free. The kitchen knife is short but sharp, and Steve only feels it in his side when the security guard twists the hilt and buries it deeper.

Instead of pain, Steve feels white-hot fury. It washes over him with a force he doesn’t recognize. This is not the tame, domesticated anger he’s used to, this is something else entirely. His hands close even tighter, and he feels flesh and bone yield under the pressure of his thumbs on the security guard’s esophagus. When the guard next coughs, there’s blood with it.

The security guard’s eyes are wide and bloodshot, there’s almost wonder in them now. He’s just on the brink of losing consciousness.

“Say it,” Steve hisses.

Steve is panting against the sharp pain in his side. His vision is blurring, and he knows it can’t be the loss of blood already. This is what madness feels like.

“Say it, you fucking –,” he spits.

He needs to hear it. He needs to hear the poisonous words from someone else’s lips, like he did a century ago from Kruger’s, and this time he’s going to be the one to end it.

The guard goes limp under his grip before Steve can finish the sentence. Steve slams his head back into the concrete, and stills.

It’s only when Steve loosens his grip around the security guard’s neck that he realizes he’s shaking. He looks up and finds Bucky next to the van, quiet, waiting, his hands hanging emptily at his sides. He looks oddly detached, but maybe that’s just because Steve still stubbornly, stupidly expects a reaction from him. When Bucky’s eyes wander down Steve’s body, they rest for an instant on the wound, the knife’s hilt still sticking from it in an odd angle. There’s not a trace of concern in Bucky’s gaze. Still, Steve feels it to the bones.

With clumsy fingers he fiddles the car keys from his pocket and holds them up for Bucky to take.

“You drive,” he says, and Bucky silently takes the keys and walks towards the driver’s door.

 

 

There’s less pain than Steve would’ve thought, but more blood.

Bucky navigates the New York City traffic calmly and precisely. Within an hour they’re in the suburbs, and it’s only early afternoon when they’ve left the city’s orbit entirely.

Steve slumps in the passenger’s seat, his shoulders rolled in as to not unnecessarily strain his abdomen. He has pulled his shirt up, examined the wound. It’s short and not too deep, but ugly. The twisting has dislodged more flesh than an ordinary cut would have. Steve is almost sure he has the serum to thank for still being conscious, or alive even. After an hour, the wound is still bleeding.

“It won’t stop,” Steve says when they pass the New York state line, and his hands are already cold and numb.

Wordlessly, and without taking his eyes off the road, Bucky uses his good hand to pull his sweater over his head and passes it to Steve.

“Press,” he says, and Steve uses what strength he has left to press the bundled fabric against his stomach, high on his left, just underneath his last rib.

Bucky keeps driving, steadily north.

 

 

It’s dark, and they haven’t seen civilization for almost an hour, when Steve’s phone rings into the silence between them.

“Rogers, you fucking moron,” Natasha says the instant he picks up. “Why the hell are you answering your phone?”

“Nat –“ Steve starts.

“That’s not how ‘off the grid’ works, Rogers, this is the 21st century. I have already circled in on your location by a five mile radius, and that’s me _on my phone_.”

“How is Russia?” Steve asks.

“We ditched Russia, Steve,” Natasha says. “Because Hill called to tell us you went AWOL literally minutes after we left US airspace and turned the plane around.”

Steve swallows. “But –,” he starts, but Natasha interrupts him.

“It could’ve been good, Steve,” she says. “It could’ve been just what he needed. It’s time you get your fucking priorities straight.”

Steve knows better than to respond.

“Also, the security guard?” she adds. She sounds like she’s scornfully pointing out a minor malpractice, but Steve can tell she’s furious beneath.

“Is he alive?” he asks.

“Still in the ER. You broke his neck.”

“So he’s not talking,” Steve concludes. “That’s a plus.”

“Fucking hell, Steve, what happened to you?” Natasha asks.

Steve pulls a face against the pain welling up from his stab wound. “Priorities,” he says. “I thought you of all people would understand.” He shifts his weight in the car seat to pin the phone between his cheek and shoulder and uses his free hand to press Bucky’s sweatshirt harder to his abdomen.

Natasha is quiet long enough for Steve to expect the tell-tale click of her disconnecting the call.

“Maria is working a night shift to cover it up,” she says eventually, sounding coolly detached as ever. “He was one of hers.”

Steve closes his eyes for a second, tries to breathe deeply, and clutches his phone tighter.

“He was HYDRA,” he says, forcing himself to sound composed.

“And he told you that,” Natasha says.

“Stuck a knife in me,” Steve responds dryly. “I’m not sure that’s standard security protocol, even with Hill’s people.”

“Jesus _fucking_ Christ,” Natasha says, but instead of anger, her voice carries mostly exasperation.

“It’s nothing a good night’s rest won’t heal,” Steve hurries to add. “At least I’ll have a scar to show for self-defense if the CCTV didn’t pick that up. I would’ve killed him, but a trail of dead bodies would’ve been _really_ bad PR.”

Steve’s neck muscles cramp and he lets go of his stomach to catch the phone before it falls down. The wound has finally started hurting properly. It’s the pain, sudden and dull, that makes his voice sting with venom.

“So what is this, then?” Natasha asks.

“We’re getting out, Nat,” Steve says. “We need it. I need it.”

“To Vermont,” Natasha says, as if that of all things was their worst offense.

“His choice,” Steve responds.

Steve can almost hear Natasha frown on the other end of the line. “You’ll be back for the preliminary hearing though, right?” she asks.

Steve doesn’t say anything. Outside, long lines of trees are rushing along the road in almost complete darkness. Bucky has his eyes fixed on the road, both hands on the steering wheel, and keeps the speed steadily over the limit.

“Because skipping bail would be fundamentally stupid,” Natasha adds. “Steve? Did you hear me? _Fundamentally_ stupid.”

Steve exhales slowly. “I know.”

“I _know_ you know that,” Natasha says, and pauses for a pregnant second before she asks: “You haven’t been handling him, have you?”

 _Get in the car, Buck_ , Steve thinks. _Stand back._ _You drive._

“I wouldn’t, Nat,” he says.

“Good,” Natasha says.

There’s an uncomfortable silence between them, suspended over the unsteady connection crackling with static.

“Take care, Steve,” Natasha says eventually, “and get rid of the fucking phone.”

She ends the call before Steve can respond.

Without a word Bucky takes the phone from him, and without letting go of the steering wheel he one-handedly disassembles its plastic casing, snapping the black rectangle of the battery from the back. He pockets it and passes the remainder of the phone back to Steve. Steve pushes it into his pocket, it's much lighter now. He feels the difference like somebody has turned down the gravitational force on him, feels like he might float away. He closes his eyes.

 

 

Bucky drives them on through the night, past clutters of houses, motorway sations and motels, and further north-east, until shortly after midnight he sways off the road onto a narrow dirt path leading deeper into the forest. Steve jerks awake, the sudden change of direction ripping him from the melange of sleep and unconsciousness lurking in the dark edges of his vision.

“Where are we?” he asks.

“We’re almost there,” Bucky says.

 

 

The cabin smells like resin and tin-can goods and gunpowder.

Bucky’s body is under Steve’s supporting his weight, and when he puts Steve down on one of the two cots in the center of the room the springs in the mattress sigh under the strain. Steve tries to get a good look at the room, but the darkness is closing in, or maybe Bucky just hasn’t switched on the light yet.

“Settle back,” Bucky says, and Steve obeys.

Bucky rummages through the corner at the far end of the room, and when he returns to Steve’s side there’s a syringe in his hand, a packet of gauze, a needle and thread.

“It won’t last,” Steve hears himself say. “I can’t be drugged.”

Wordlessly, Bucky puts his instruments on the floor next to the bed and rips Steve’s blood-caked shirt open with a swift, smooth motion. He picks the syringe off the floor – far from sanitary, Steve thinks sluggishly, but then he has lived through worse in the mud of the battlefield – and administers a dose of whatever is in there right next to Steve’s wound where his flesh is almost black in the darkness, swollen. He doesn’t even feel the needle go in.

“You need stitches,” Bucky says, and picks up needle and thread next.

He works with steady, practiced precision. Even though it takes all the strength he has left to hold his head up, Steve keeps his eyes on Bucky’s working hands, his metal one pinching Steve’s torn flesh together, his good one pushing the needle through, tying the thread neatly. There is no pain, or at least there isn’t more than what Steve is already feeling, dull and thumping through his body.

Bucky’s mouth is thin with focus, the edges twitching, the tip of his tongue showing between his lips. He cowers hunched over next to the bed, his face close to the wound, close enough for the tips of his hair to brush Steve’s unharmed skin. Far from sanitary, Steve thinks, but then. But then.

He has never known Bucky’s hair this long, he’d always thought it’d fall in curls, soft to the touch like plumes. He wants to reach out to it, but his hands are too heavy.

“Stay awake,” Bucky says.

Steve tries his best to haul his mind back into consciousness. There’s a thought nagging at the back of his head, a stinging idea, hurting. If only he could vocalize it.

“I never meant to give you orders,” Steve puts together, his tongue heavy. “In the garage, I never meant.” He stops when his breath won’t carry the rest of the sentence.

Bucky finishes his stitch, his knot, before he looks up at Steve. His eyes are blank, but there’s a shadow catching on his cheek where his muscles tense over a set jaw.

“When I first came back, every single time you called me ‘Bucky’ made me want to put a bullet through my brain,” he says, his voice flat.

Steve swallows, and finds it hard to go back to breathing afterwards.

“They fucked me up,” Bucky says. “Sometimes I don’t know if I’m healing or just getting used to it.” He looks at Steve for a long moment. “They can’t get to me anymore, and neither can you.” Then, just like that, he turns back to stitching Steve’s wound.

Steve tries to lift his head to look at Bucky again. His consciousness is hazy at most, his thoughts move sluggishly, but this is urgent. “I will get them back for what they did to you,” he says. “I will make them bleed.” The words slur when he says them, their edges rounded by his numb lips.

Bucky doesn’t look up, but he raises one hand from his work and pushes Steve’s head back to rest on the mattress, and Steve has no strength left to fight it.

“Don’t talk,” Bucky says.

 

 

It must be morning already when Bucky steps out of the bathroom. Steve follows his motions under heavy lids, watches him settle down on the other cot. There are thin strips of light coming through the windows where they’re not blacked out with cardboard and newspaper, dust tumbling in them, disturbed where Bucky walked through it.

Steve feels like he’s watching through thick glass, sound and motion muffled. Bucky’s skin looks almost translucent in the pale light. Steve wills his eyes open for just a minute longer, forces himself to bear testimony to what he sees, what he remembers. _Is this man James Buchanan Barnes?_ , the caption asks.

The lines Steve used to be so familiar with don’t align anymore in the same way they used to. Bucky is broader than he used to be, heavier. There are scars where there used to be smooth skin, merging into angry red and then into metal. The cut on his left side has vanished already into a new thin, pink line. Time and violence have taken their toll on Bucky in a way they never did on Steve. But then there’s the line of his jaw, obscured by stubble now, and the dimple in his chin, the defined edge of his collarbone, and, moving down, a trail of dark hair vanishing beneath the waistband of his sweatpants, starting from the navel, and all of that is so familiar still, it almost hurts. Steve remembers everything.

“Buck –,” he starts.

“Rest,” Bucky says.

Trying to breathe around the pain in his side Steve settles back on the bed and drifts off to unconscious sleep only instants later.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's a teaser for chapter four:
> 
> _“Is this where you went?” Steve asks. “After D. C.?”_


	4. Four

 

 

In the light of day the front of the cabin is pockmarked with bullet holes. It’s only then that Steve realizes the purpose of the cardboard in the windows is not to black out, it’s to keep wind and rain from sweeping in through broken glass. The cabin rests on a narrow terrace clinging to a hillside covered in the tall, naked trunks of fir trees. Bucky has left the car parked on a small clearing a few yards down, a steep trail little more than a game pass leading towards it from the cabin.

“You shouldn’t be out here,” Bucky says, emerging in the frame of the metal cabin door that’s lopsided in its hinges, dented, like the front, with obvious marks of direct fire. Rust has corroded the edges of the bullet holes, spreading slowly but steadily under the splintering coat of paint. Bucky looks at Steve, his eyes narrow.

Steve's hand is resting where he can feel the patch of gauze through his sweatshirt, and beneath an uncomfortable heat concentrating, pulsing in time with his heartbeat where he’s already healing. When he woke up in the pitch-black darkness of the cabin, the taste of dust heavy and dry on his tongue, the one thing he craved was fresh air. He feels the pale sunlight to his bones, the cold air sharp in his lungs.

Steve wonders briefly if it is security Bucky is worried about, if he expects helicopters or drones even this far out, if it is concern about Steve’s injury, or something else entirely. Bucky’s face is stern. He’s wearing a dark green jacket Steve doesn’t recognize, that looks too big for him despite his impressive size, and gloves to hide the tell-tale gleam of his metal hand. He’s carrying a loose bag the contents of which Steve can’t make out and a heavy, double-barreled shotgun.

“You were out forty-eight hours.” Bucky's mouth is a thin line.

“I'm better now,” Steve says. “I heal fast.”

There's a stretch of silence between them, neither of them moving, Bucky with his hand still resting on the door's latch.

“What is this place?” Steve asks.

“It's safe,” Bucky says. He throws his weight against the cabin door to shut it. A shower of fir needles cascades from the roof over Steve's head, falling down on his shoulders.

“Everyone who was briefed on this location died here in 1998,” Bucky adds when he sees Steve frown, as if that explained anything. Then he shoulders his bag, and, after checking the door one last time, starts walking down the narrow path following the slope of the hillside without once looking back.

It's only when he's already a few yards ahead that Bucky turns around. “Are you coming?”

It pulls on Steve like a thread through his chest, tied to his spine. He gets up, his shoulders rolled in to accommodate the pain in his abdomen, and follows Bucky along the hillside.

 

 

They scale the slope, pass the saddle and find themselves on a clearing clinging to the Northern shoulder of the hill. The shadows are long here, and the feeble sun hasn't yet licked the ice off the fir trunks where they face north, nor off the soft needles and patches of grass covering the ground.

Steve's hands have lost any sense of touch. The cold has crept under his sweatshirt while they were walking, his icy breath biting his nose and lips. His wound is throbbing.

“Stay back,” Bucky says, and Steve takes the opportunity to support his weight against one of the tree trunks. His lungs are burning like they last did in Brooklyn winters half a century ago. He coughs once and half expects blood with it.

Bucky turns around, a warning finger raised to his lips. Steve remembers their time crisscrossing the Italo-Austrian border in the middle of a wet winter, and his own futile attempts at shooting or snaring anything that was not a two-legged target. He remembers the Howlies’ remarks about it, mostly good-natured, except when they were chewing their teeth and tongues with hunger, about how he lacked the ruthlessness to finish innocent lives. It still leaves a bitter taste in Steve’s mouth.

Bucky covers the meadow systematically, crisscrossing through the frozen blades of grass without making a sound. It reminds Steve of feline predators, and that is odd: all his life Steve has known Bucky dogged, and then, when he returned, wolfish. There is an unnerving stillness about the forest, every sound echoing multiplied between the trees, none of them familiar to Steve’s ears. Out here he couldn’t tell a birdcall from the cocking of an odd gun.

Bucky abruptly stops in his tracks, as if frozen in place. He only moves to jerk his head, indicating Steve to approach. Steve feels clumsy and enormous when he pulls away from the tree trunk and crosses the distance between them, crushing ice and needles under his feet.

It's only when Steve arrives at Bucky's side that he sees the rabbit. It's on its side, its hind legs tied with the wire of a snare pulled tight. The snare itself is unhinged, but not torn out. The rabbit must have struggled to free itself. Now it lies completely still except for its frantic breath, its flank rising and falling rapidly. Its eyes are slick with terror, its fur already shimmering with icy crystals.

“How do we kill it?” Steve asks.

“You break its neck,” Bucky says.

When Steve looks up, he finds Bucky standing close. He can almost feel his heat radiating. Bucky looks at him, and even though his expression is blank, Steve knows a dare when he sees one. He falls down to his knees, his stitches aching.

When he closes his hands around the rabbit's neck he finds it thinner than he thought, bones not more solid than a bundle of sticks. Even through the numbness of the cold in his fingers he feels the rabbit's pulse racing, its heat catching in its fur. Its eyes are wide enough to see the whites at the edges.

Steve presses his eyes shut and locks his grip, moves his hands like he's wringing a towel, and even though the rabbit is still twitching, he instantly knows when its gone. The ugly sound of bones breaking is deafening in the stillness of the forest. There's something abject about its slack body now, still radiating warmth. Steve drops it to the ground. He feels like retching, but his abdominal muscles protest. He feels feverish. And Bucky is still watching him.

Bucky unceremoniously picks the rabbit's body off the floor and slings it over his shoulder on the wires still attached to its hind legs. There is no blood, but Steve can see its teeth where its mouth is ajar. Its eyes are already glazed over with a dull shadow.

“Come on, then,” Bucky says, and Steve follows.

 

 

Bucky navigates the small space of the cabin with an efficiency that, Steve recognizes, must come with familiarity. His hands blindly reach into the drawers of the small kitchen set opposite the two cots as he expertly skins and guts the rabbit and hangs it up on a hook above the stove. Next he lights a fire in the stove.

“Won’t the smoke be a problem?” Steve asks from his cot, watching as the flames burn down to embers through the opened hatch. The sense of touch is slowly returning to his aching hands. His wound is burning now. He doesn't dare to touch the patch of gauze.

“Not while it’s dark,” Bucky says, and fits the rabbit, head, tail and all, into a tin to shove it into the heated oven. On the stove a pot full of water is already boiling. Bucky is right: outside their barred windows the mellow semi-darkness of dusk has turned into pitch-black.

The smell of cooking meat fills the cabin and Steve’s stomach clenches. He can’t quite tell if it’s hunger or nausea, maybe both. Bucky counts four spoon-fulls of dry instant soup into the boiling water. “I didn’t know you could cook,” Steve says.

Bucky doesn’t respond, keeps his hands busy stirring, cleaning up the rabbit's skin and guts. He drops them into a plastic bag on the floor. _Dumb thing to say anyways_ , Steve thinks.

A short while passes until Bucky takes the rabbit from the oven, burned crisp, and extinguishes the last bit of smoke with a gush of water. Steve receives a bowl full of hot soup and one of the rabbit's legs, torn unceremoniously from its body. He rests the bowl in his lap while he tries the hot meat, gingerly holding on to it with both hands.

Bucky has pulled the only chair up to the kitchen set, his bowl resting on the counter, and digs into his unseasoned meat like he hasn’t had food in days. In between bites his gaze wanders off to a breach in the boarded windows, pointing out towards the downward slope where the car is parked, and up to where a glass bottle is hanging underneath the low ceiling, a thin wire leading from it towards one of the windows, and out. Bucky holds on to his bowl with both hands when he empties his soup to the last drop.

Afterwards he sits and watches Steve pick at his own food. It’s not just the abdominal wound, it’s not the salty instant soup and not the skinny rabbit burned black in patches that’s making Steve’s stomach turn. Steve can’t remember when he last enjoyed a meal, and he’s had his choice of Stark’s fancy takeaway orders and Sam’s exceptional cooking. His body is out of tune, doesn’t know hunger from anger from nausea anymore. He has no idea if Bucky would be offended by his lack of appetite, but he tries his best to conceal it anyways.

“You’ve been here before,” he states, when he can’t force any more of the stringy meat down, meeting Bucky’s unabashed gaze.

“Killed my first rabbit with an AK 105,” Bucky says not without pride. It’s the first real hint of emotion Steve can make out behind his blank expression. Steve lets the remainders of his rabbit’s leg sink into his lap. “Learned to build snares after,” Bucky adds.

“Is this where you went?” Steve asks, softly, expecting the directness of his question to somehow startle Bucky. “After D. C.?”

“I was here in 1998 when the op went south,” Bucky says, the words sounding strange from his mouth, like he is reading someone’s report off a piece of paper. “Cleaned up the mess and stayed for two weeks before they found me,” he continues. “I killed them, too, buried them, and reported for duty two days later in Syracuse. I don’t know how I made it that long on my own, I didn’t know anything. I was starving.”

Bucky looks at Steve for a long moment, his brows knitted, chasing an elusive memory.

“They patched me up, wiped me, but I kept the location, somehow,” Bucky says. “It came up after D. C., like a hunch. Lots of things did.” It feels like he is spilling over, maybe unintentionally, and Steve can’t bring himself to ask further, steer him, or stop him, not now that he's finally talking.

Bucky’s face smooths out, he gets up and takes the bowl and bone from Steve, puts the rabbit’s leg in the tin with the rest of the meat and the bowl into the sink next to his own.

“D. C. is the first thing I really remember,” Bucky says. His tone is conversational, he’s facing away from Steve. It’s little more than a remark on the side, nothing of consequence.

Steve’s body stills.

“I remember you on that bridge,” Bucky says to his hands in the sink, rinsing the dishes. “I remember seeing you, and you didn’t make sense. You were there, but you were _wrong_. I started wondering what else I had forgotten.”

Steve feels the barely swallowed soup and rabbit stir in his stomach. There is a new sharpness to the pain in his abdomen that, maybe, comes with the fact that he’s not breathing properly, his muscles tense.

“I remember pain, mostly, with that,” Bucky says. He turns around to Steve, meets his eyes. “They got to me,” he says. “Here.” He makes a fleeting gesture to his head. Steve doesn’t know how intentionally it evokes the image of a gun pointed to his temple, but he swallows the bile welling up with it anyways.

“It’s hard to tell the difference between what’s me and what’s them. They established triggers of all sorts, same with the names. Bucky.” He says it like it’s someone else’s. And then: “Steve.”

The syllable draws sullen from his lips. Bucky has settled back down on his chair, leaned back against it, the wooden joints creaking and straining under his weight. He is watching Steve’s reaction closely.

“It was clever, I guess, making me want to kill myself the instant someone recognized me,” Bucky says. “Even when there wasn’t anyone left but you.”

 _But you didn't_ , is the first thing that pops to Steve’s mind, and he bites it back instantly, and hates himself for thinking it. It’s that exact feeling that corroded him slowly over the past months, that made him believe Bucky would come home to him, grateful, once Stark had paid his bail. It’s the same damned sense of self-importance that made him hope, stupidly, they could somehow return to how they were before the war. There could be an abundance of reasons the trigger didn’t go off, and maybe Steve is better off not knowing any of them.

“I’m glad you didn’t,” he says instead, his voice hoarse when he tries it.

Bucky’s eyes dart to Steve’s face, and rest there for a while, unblinking.

“I never missed you,” Bucky says. He says it flatly, bluntly, like he doesn’t know what to do with it, like he knows it to be true but needs to see Steve’s reaction to judge the magnitude of it, to see what it means for him, for them.

“It’s okay,” is the first thing Steve can think to say, and he says it followed shortly by the second: “I’m sorry.”

“Why?” Bucky asks, his bright eyes still fixed unflinching on Steve’s face.

“I’m sorry for what they did to you,” Steve specifies. “I’m really, I’m so –”

“Are you in pain?” Bucky asks.

Steve didn't even realize there were tears in his eyes. He hasn’t let anyone see him cry through any of this, not Natasha, not even Sam, and has stopped crying altogether when Bucky returned. Bucky can’t use him weak.

Steve shakes his head although it’s only half true. His insides are twisted with the mere idea of the pain Bucky must’ve lived through, the amount of which he can barely begin to grasp, and with it comes his own incapability to fix any of it, heal any of it, make any of it better for either one of them. It's pain he can't even allow himself to feel because compared to Bucky he's had it easy. Steve takes a shaking breath, angrily wipes the tears off his cheeks.

“I’m okay,” he says.

“I did know you,” Bucky says decisively, and it sounds almost like an apology, almost like a clumsy attempt at comfort. “In D. C., I must’ve. You ripped me out of it.”

“Don’t –,” Steve says. _Don’t do me any favors,_ he wants to say. _Don’t lie for me. Don’t soften the blow._ If Bucky has a right to anything it’s the right to his own honest truth, no takebacks, no caution. He stops himself in his tracks, reconsiders the imperative.

“You don’t have to make this easy on me,” Steve says instead. “I can take it.”

“You have no idea,” Bucky says, and something in is voice catches with Steve. It’s a momentary flare-up of Bucky in the trenches, his jaw tight and his eyes bright with the things he’d seen, only now there’s a new, sharper edge to the bitterness Steve remembers as dull and toothless. His quietness, his precision, punctured only by short bursts of dark, unsmiling humor, had looked like commitment then. It’s only now Steve realizes that the war has eaten Bucky whole, carved him out and filled him new, before Zola even laid a finger on him.

“Try me,” Steve says, unable still to back down from a challenge.

Bucky’s eyes rest steadily on Steve. He raises his metal hand slowly, and for a moment Steve’s instinct expects a threat. But Bucky’s hand just finds the edge of his own sweatshirt and pulls it up, reveals the defined muscle of his right side underneath. Bucky stands up, pulls the shirt almost to his armpit, and pushes the waistband of his sweatpants down. His motions are forceful, almost petulant. He steps closer to Steve, turns his bared right side towards him in the light of the gas lamp on Steve’s bedside table.

At first Steve thinks it’s just an odd collection of ugly scars, short like shrapnel marks, assembled along the long line of his torso, but when he looks closer they come together in terrifying shapes. The oldest, in the center of Bucky’s lowest rib, are almost faded, some thick and knotted, healed crudely. The newest, on his hip bone, is still pink, the skin on it looking young and raw.

They’re initials, carved with the sharpened tip of a knife. For some of the bludgeoned ones Steve is sure the knife must’ve been hot as well, or lined with acid.

Steve stares at them, his unblinking eyes burning. Bucky is standing completely still, his ribcage only slightly rising and falling with shallow, calm breaths. He looks like the stance is familiar, like he’s used to presenting the evidence of his handlers. The oldest scar, where his ribcage meets the abdomen, reads A Z. One further up his side, etched precise and confident, A P. The youngest scar on his hip is a sloppy and lopsided B R. Between them there’s more, an incomprehensibly long list of shortened names anonymized by time, dating back, Steve knows, as long as seventy years into the past.

“Bucky, I –” Steve starts, and stops.

His eyes flick up to Bucky’s face, towering over him, and Bucky looks down. There’s a myriad of words jammed up in Steve’s throat, and none of them fitting, none of them enough, not with Bucky so close, and so bared. And it’s all wrong, because the feeling pooling hot in the pit of Steve’s stomach should be disgust, or grief, or anger, but it isn’t, it’s something else entirely: a rush of memory to his system, muscle memory almost, that makes his skin feel tight and his fingertips prickle with the urge to touch. Oh, he remembers this. It’s a feeling that doesn’t quite attach to anyone else. It took Bucky for Steve to understand what people meant when they talked of _longing_. It mixes hot and acidic with the undigested rabbit in the pit of his stomach, boiling, making it impossible to do or say anything right.

When Bucky drops his shirt over his exposed side after a stretch of silence, lets his waistband slide back into place, and turns away from Steve, Steve feels mostly relief, and then a side of bereavement that makes his insides coil.

Bucky picks up the grocery bag on the floor, filled with the rabbit’s skin and intestines. “I’m taking this out,” he says. He hesitates for a beat before he turns away, something else being left unsaid, and leaves Steve with the distinct impression of having failed this test on all counts.

The instant Bucky is out of the door Steve hauls himself off the bed and to the bathroom, his stitches screaming in protest, and empties the contents of his stomach into the toilet bowl.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's a teaser for chapter five:
> 
>  
> 
> _It's a familiar kind of rage, one that used to live comfortably in his hollow chest between his failing lungs and useless heart._


	5. Five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fair warning, guys: We're approaching Deep Shit Territory.

 

 

They take the car a mile and several serpentines down the road to the next motorway station. The flannel shirt, moth-eaten, smelling like centuries of dust, stretches tight over Steve's back, but it blends in better than the thin high-tech fabric of the clothes Stark has provided for him. His wound is throbbing with healing under its patch of gauze. Bucky is wearing his green jacket, the gloves to hide his metal hand. He carries their ancient shotgun. It has proven to be more of a blunt instrument than a precise firearm, but in these parts it makes them less suspicious.

They have agreed to let Bucky do the talking.

“Your face is all over the news,” Steve had argued.

“Yours is on a box of cornflakes,” Bucky had replied, dead-pan. “They know me here.”

The shop is small and crammed. Steve spots baby formula next to fish hooks, hard soap stuffed in a shelf with lighter fuel and, for some reason, scented candles. The cans on the top shelves are covered in dust. People around here have seen real winters. Expiration dates don't matter much when the next Walmart is two hours away and spring only a distant memory.

Steve strolls through the aisles while Bucky talks to the shopkeeper, a man who inexplicably reminds Steve of the ancient land turtle they used to have in Central Park Zoo, older than any of them and likely to survive them all – or at least the ones not suspended through time by ice and chemicals. He makes a mental note to see if it's still there when – if – they ever make it back to New York. He turns a corner and spots his likeness on a box of Capt'n Crunch – a determined grimace, the lines adding up to sharp angles. He wonders if it looks like him at all. He doesn't feel like it, feels soft ever since they came to the forest, like his definitions are fading.

Behind the counter, in the top left corner of the room, a TV set is running commercials. Bucky is taking his time with the shopkeeper, they seem familiar. Maybe they are. God knows how much time Bucky spent here, hiding, healing, finding himself, and somehow coming to the conclusion that giving himself over to the authorities of the city he helped destroy was his best course of action.

Anything vegetable, protein bars, milk, and as many cartridges of ammunition as the rest of Steve's cash would buy is what they have agreed on. The shopkeeper shoves the crumpled notes and single coins into piles on the counter, slowly adding them up. Bucky has his gloved hands propped against the edge, the shotgun resting on top of it next to him. Steve picks through the news stand hoping for a recent paper but finds only faded dime novels instead, and next to them a pair of tits bulging from the glossy cover of a porn magazine. Steve focuses his attention on the TV instead. The commercials have made way for a flashy newscaster's logo.

The screen cuts to a wind-swept reporter in front of a New York City apartment block, fumbling with her headpiece. It takes Steve a second to reconcile the familiar front of the building with the havoc that is being wreaked in front of it: police lines, broadcasting vans, boom arms with furry microphones attached to them, cameras everywhere. This is their place, or it used to be. Now it looks like it is under siege.

“Carmen, what do you think are the chances for Rogers to comment on the current situation before the preliminary hearing?” a young news anchor asks from his tile in the top right corner of the screen.

“Slim, Jerry, very slim,” the reporter says, pressing the headphones to her ear with one hand and adjusting the mic to her mouth with the other. “As you can see, the situation here is somewhat chaotic–” The camera pans to the side, revealing a throng of journalists, protesters and onlookers, just barely held back by a hurriedly set up police perimeter.

“In fact we haven't seen Rogers at all since–” Her eyes are caught by something off-screen and her gaze goes vacant for a second before she focuses her attention back on the camera in front of her.

“Jerry, I've just been informed we'll be getting our statement after all,” she says. “It'll only be a couple of minutes—” She staggers as she's being shoulder-checked by another reporter and camera team pushing in, “– a couple of minutes until we can expect–”

The connection is cut. The flustered young news anchor is re-arranging his sheets, thrown off by the sudden lack of teleprompter.

“We'll – we'll be cutting back to Carmen in Manhattan any second now---”

Steve turns around to Bucky. Bucky, too, is staring at the screen, his brow furrowed. For a second their gazes meet. It's impossible to tell what Bucky is thinking.

“While we're re-establishing the connection here's a quick run-down of the Winter Soldier case so far---”

The screen cuts to archive footage, the same protesters in front of the D.C. courthouse they've been showing for weeks, the same signs, Bucky's army portrait printed larger than life, and then, once again, the blurred CCTV footage from the D.C. attacks, the Winter Soldier a black speck amid the rubble. It still feels incredible to Steve, how they managed to mount the entire responsibility for this event on one man's back alone, the one man who stands taunt and solitary in the midst of its debris, no less. This is a generation that has never seen war like they have, Steve reminds himself. How would they know better? How would they know it's not the soldiers that make a war, it's the generals, and the Winter Soldier's generals have never been called to justice?

The screen cuts back, and suddenly there's Sam in front of the apartment building in New York, surrounded by security fighting off the onslaught of microphones, cameras and cellphones pushed in his face.

Carmen, her cheeks a heightened red, her neat coiffure disheveled, is fighting her way to the front.

“Mr Wilson, when can we expect a statement from Captain America?”

Sam looks impossibly tired. His jaw is taunt and in his stance there is something Steve hasn't ever seen there before: aggression.

“Steve Rogers is not available for comment at this point in time,” Sam says. The camera has zoomed in on his face, but Steve is sure he has his hands balled to fists out of frame. He is being bombarded with questions from all sides.

“This is a very personal moment of crisis for Mr Rogers and I'd like to ask you to respect his privacy,” Sam says. Steve knows he rehearsed it.

“Is it true the Winter Soldier lives with him now?” a reporter screams from the back.

Sam's expression darkens. “James Barnes is a free U.S. citizen and where he spends his time is none of your concern.”

A new tumult breaks loose. “Is that a yes?” - “Fucking treason!” - “Where _is_ Rogers?” Steve thinks he can spot the blurred outline of Stark in the door of the building behind Sam, his arms crossed.

“I'm asking you to respect Mr Rogers' and Mr Barnes' privacy at this point in time,” Sam repeats, his jaw twitching.

“Do you find your own loyalties challenged, knowing Rogers is fraternizing with the enemy?” one reporter asks.

“I do n--,” Sam starts, but his answer is drowned out by the screams and whistles of protesters. A boom operator abruptly lowers his mic, hitting Sam in the face, while two security guards are pressed closer to his side by the crowd.

“Fucking traitor!” a woman screams, grappling with one of the security guards. The cameraman is losing his footing, losing Sam out of focus. The woman is being carried off by security guards, but before the live stream cuts to black Steve can see her clearly: her angry hands, clawing into the officer's arms, and her mouth, an ugly, disgusted grimace, while she gathers saliva in her mouth and spits it in Sam's face.

The neat studio is a stark contrast to the tumult in the street. The newscaster is holding on to his sheets, looking into the camera like a deer caught in the headlights. “That was – that was Carmen Fuentes live from Steve Rogers' New York apartment, Carmen? – we seem to have lost her --”

“Sir?”

The room around Steve falls back into focus, quiet, both Bucky and the shopkeeper looking not at the TV, but at him.

“Sir,” the shopkeeper repeats. Steve only realizes he has his hands balled to fists around one of the pulp novels when Bucky's gloved hand forces it from his grip.

“He has family in D.C.,” Bucky explains, smoothing out the cover and placing the novel on the counter. “I'm sorry. We'll take that, too.”

Steve watches the shopkeeper's wary face falter.

“Man, _I'm_ sorry,” the shopkeeper says, looking at Steve. “Fucking disgrace. Hope your family is alright.”

Steve's mouth his dry, and Bucky cuts in before Steve can respond: “Don't worry, they will be. Gotta see that fucker pay for it, is all.”

He pushes one of the heavy packed paper bags into Steve's arms and shoves him towards the front door.

“Damn right,” the shopkeeper says. “Fucking enemy of the state he is and his whole damn lot.”

Bucky nods. “See ya around, Sir,” he says, and pushes Steve through the door, the bells chiming.

 

 

“That was fucking risky behavior,” Bucky bites. He has shoved Steve onto the passenger seat of their car, the groceries on his lap.

Steve looks at his profile, his knotted brows. Bucky has taken off the gloves, his metal right holding on fast to the steering wheel. It takes him three tries to start the car. Steve's blood is still boiling.

“Did you _see_ Sam?” he snaps, as Bucky maneuvers the car out of the dirt patch that serves as a parking lot next to the shop and onto the road. Steve's hands are shaking. “Did you see what they _did_?”

“It's not worth losing your fucking head over,” Bucky says. “You could've just waltzed in there with your shield, it would've been less suspicious. You gotta keep your cool.”

“Was that easy for you? Keeping your cool?” Steve asks, and the edge of an accusation slips out with it.

“What are you talking about?” Bucky asks. His mouth is tight.

“With the shopkeeper. _Make the fucker pay._ It looked easy.”

Bucky's eyes flicker over to Steve. He steers the car through the first serpentine and accelerates. “It's an act.”

Steve thinks back to Bucky in the flat, nonverbal. To how the words seemed to fight their way out whenever he talked to Steve since, never more than entirely necessary, never entirely enough, and how smoothly he slipped into enemy skin just now.

“Never knew you could act,” Steve says.

“Everything's a fucking act,” Bucky says, and says nothing else for the remainder of the drive.

 

 

In the cabin Bucky puts the black, rectangular phone battery on Steve's nightstand.

“Tell him we're okay,” he says. “You owe him that at least.”

 

 

The sky is hanging low outside, the tips of the fir-trees almost scratching the clouds. The air is crisp and heavy with the smell of snow that hasn’t yet fallen. Steve shivers in his sweatshirt, pulls the sleeves down. His heart is suddenly pounding. He feels unbalanced, his fingertips numb as he types in the number.

Sam answers the phone like Steve has learned most military men answer their mobiles: short, precise, awaiting orders.

“Sam, it’s me,” Steve says, and for a dreadful moment there’s silence on the other end.

“Steve,” Sam says then. There’s a cool edge to his voice and Steve's heart drops.

“I saw you on TV. I just wanted to let you know we’re safe,” Steve says, but he can hear his own cheerfulness sound fake as it echoes down the line.

“I heard you took a knife to the gut,” Sam says, and it sounds more like _Serves you right_ than like genuine concern, which, in itself, is concerning coming from Sam.

“I’m healing,” Steve says. There’s another silence. “Where are y–“, Steve starts, but Sam interrupts him.

“Listen,” Sam says. “I’ve got a lot to say, but you’re probably tight on battery so I’m not gonna say any of it until I’ve got you back face to face.” He hesitates, and, Steve realizes too late, gives Steve a break to cut in. “Give me something, Steve,” Sam presses. “I get that a _why_ is probably too complex, and a _where_ might be unsafe, but give me something to work with. What happened?”

That is a good question, Steve has to admit, and not one he knows how to answer.

“I couldn’t stay in the flat,” Steve tries, hoping for Sam’s empathetic strength. “I couldn’t do it, it was killing me.”

“Don’t be melodramatic,” Sam retorts, and of course he is right. Sam deserves more than metaphors, he deserves the truth.

“Flight instinct kicked in,” Steve says, “and Bucky was there, and the photo felt like a real threat.” He listens to his own words, still unconvincing. “I felt it deep down, the threat, I’ve felt it for months now. Suddenly I couldn’t think of a good enough reason to not just.” He stops. The word is _run_ , but then it isn’t – because he doesn’t run, Sam knows that, but that is exactly what he did, and it is out of character, and it’s not something he can explain.

“You would’ve talked me out of it,” is Steve’s answer to Sam’s unasked question: _Why are you only telling me now, why not then, why not while there was still time to turn the plane around?_ And Sam laughs dryly because he knows.

“Did you plan it?” Sam asks.

“No,” Steve hurries to say. “No, Sam, it was a spur-of-the-moment thing, I promise.” He realizes too late how terrible that sounds, with the last promise he gave Sam still broken between them.

“I miss you, Sam,” Steve tries, weakly, and imagines Sam with his lips pressed together tight, holding back a kind response. Steve knows Sam well enough to know he forgives easily, Sam is soft like that. Please, Steve thinks, let him still be soft like that.

“Bucky is doing great,” Steve offers when Sam doesn’t say anything. “He’s very,” Steve hesitates. “He’s very in charge, you know? He takes responsibility, it’s good for him. He’s healing,” he adds, and thinks of Bucky quiet in the cabin, and how the silence between them has a different quality to it now, bristling with static instead of heavy and dull, and how that has to be progress, surely.

“So was it worth the collateral?” Sam asks, and now Steve is certain he hears bitterness in his voice. Steve knows the sound of that to his bone.

“The security guard,” Steve says, trying to sound guilty about it, because of course that’s what Sam expects. That’s what Steve would’ve felt, before. Suddenly he’s not sure when that _before_ was. Before Bucky returned? Before D. C.? Before New York? The ice? The war? It hardly matters. His mind drifts back to the man lying under him, with life snuffed from his body just like that, and he realizes that at some point the pain has obliterated his capacity to feel sorry.

“Did he make it?” Steve asks.

“No,” Sam says.

Steve sets his jaw against it, sternly. The forest stills around him, the sound of the birdsong muted, but he allows himself only a moment of quietness. Looking back does nothing except create a breach in defense, it’s the first lesson you learn on the battlefield. Keep your eyes front, march on. There’s no winning a war with haunted soldiers.

“That’s one less for us to bring down,” Steve says harshly.

On the other end of the line Sam is quiet for a few breaths before he says: “His background check came back clean. If he was HYDRA he was damn good at hiding it.”

“But he stabbed me,” Steve responds automatically.

“It was two against one, he was cornered.”

“I was unarmed, he had a gun.”

“You can be intimidating even with bare hands,” Sam says. “Plus, Bucky was there. The whole world has seen what he can do.” Sam swallows. “He was one of Maria's. You made a mistake, Steve.”

It washes over Steve cold. He thinks back to the garage, the neon lights, the buzz of adrenaline in his veins. He is sure he doesn’t remember the fear of a cornered animal. He remembers the tell-tale smile of superiority. The eyes, cold, bleak, cruel. He remembers that clearly. He remembers –

He doesn’t remember anything, he realizes. Nothing that could not as well be a product of his high-strung imagination, stress, panic. Flight instinct let loose, it’s not something he ever allowed himself to learn how to deal with. He does remember letting go of self-control easily. He remembers feeling bones crush and life trickle away, and he remembers satisfaction with it.

Steve feels a familiar kind of rage welling up, one that used to live comfortably in his hollow chest between his failing lungs and useless heart. It used to come with not being enough, never enough to fill his place in the world as good as it deserved to be filled, never enough to finish the job completely and to finish it right, not even after the serum, as it turns out. Not even now. He has traveled through centuries distorted by strange lenses and gilded mirrors, by rumor and legend and commentary. Not once has the world seen him right, not once has the world seen him fully. For the longest time he has tried to live up to it but now he is so tired.

“I have killed for him before,” Steve says, and the words taste like iron on his tongue. It’s the truth, but Steve knows as well as Sam it’s the kind of truth you don’t speak, it’s the kind that burns bridges and harms to the bone. It’s the truth, Steve has learned, soldiers leave on the battlefield, or, if they can’t, in their nightmares. You don’t carry it with you, and you don’t make a weapon of it. He takes it now gratefully.

“You know what they did to me for it?” he continues, and answers the question immediately: “They gave me a medal and a pension. They made me their poster boy for progress. I thought this century was different, but it isn’t. I’ve kept killing and they’ve kept lapping at my feet, it makes me sick, Sam, it makes me fucking sick.”

It wells up in Steve like bile, the fury he has been holding down for too long. “I was a good, fair soldier for maybe a day, and then you get to the front, and then you get to the mud, and then you realize if you don’t kill them first they will kill you, or the ones you love, and you start to see purpose in it, and then you find joy in it. Didn't you ever feel it?”

He breathes deeply, the cold air stinging in his lungs. He realizes he has started pacing along the hillside, away from the cabin, and stops to turn around. It sits there quietly among the fir trees, looking deserted. Steve knows there is warmth and shelter inside, there is Bucky waiting, but he can't feel it now. Snow has started to tumble around him soundlessly. He is shaking.

“He was a soldier, like us,” Steve says, willing his voice to sound steady. “He killed people, like we did, but he never had a choice. They put us on pedestals and him on trial, how is that fair? How do you fight a fight like that if not dirty?”

“Right now you're not fighting,” Sam says. Steve can sense the sting of anger in it, but Sam is still controlling it, keeping his voice level, patience with a petulant child. “Do you realize that, Steve? Right now you're running, and innocent people are paying for it.”

The controlled calmness of Sam's voice makes Steve’s palms itch with the urge to reach out to wherever Sam is, grab him and shake him to finally excite a real feeling, something blunt and ugly, like the things he is feeling right now. But he can't speak, and Sam continues.

“You can't run from this, Steve, it's not an option. You're only making it worse. I'm not even talking about me here, you're making it worse for him more than anyone,” Sam says. He sounds urgent now. “You've got to bring him back. He's got a shot with this trial, you've got to let him take it.”

“You don't get it, do you?” Steve bites, his throat tight.

It used to be Steve’s part, the _There's another way_ , he knows it intimately even after all this time. It feels delusional now, with everything the world has done to them. There is no other way but out. Steve’s history with trying to find one is one of failures. He should have run from the start, but he has always stayed, too fucking dutiful for his own good, and he has never been happy.

“This is a war, that's what it is,” Steve says. Snowflakes are melting through his sweatshirt in icy patches. “It's just another fucking war. I'm sick of it, Sam, I want out.” His fingers clutch the phone tightly enough to hurt. “I'm done playing by their rules.” He takes a deep gulp of ice-cold air, trying to steady himself. “You're either with me in this or you're not.”

Sam is quiet for a long moment, and when he does speak he sounds like he does it despite himself.

“You're making him a fugitive for the rest of his life, Steve,” Sam says. “God knows I love you, but there is a line.”

Steve feels like the air is being pushed from his lungs, not with a punch, but slowly, like torture. He presses the phone to his ear harder with numb fingers.

“We're here for you, Steve, if you want it,” Sam continues. “Nat and I, Clint, Maria, and even Tony. Honestly, I'll do whatever I can. You've seen that. But we're _here_.” Sam's voice sounds flat through the static. “You're on your own out there.”

“I'm trying to save him,” Steve says when he can find his voice again, his jaw set against the urge to cry. It comes out stubborn, too much like he's trying to take up arms against windmills. Steve is sure Sam can hear it too.

“So are we,” Sam says.

It's only then that it all falls into place: the secret mission plans, the weekends away with the Hawleys, the constant surveillance, the frequent visits, the private chats not intended for Steve's ears. It's a charade. They built it around Steve to look like protection, when really all it was was damage control. He is their weakest link, and the formidable irony is this: The article made him look like a lunatic, possibly dangerous, and now he has proven the point by destroying Bucky's chances at acquittal and killing an innocent man, and feeling sorry for it is a chore. Maybe a lunatic is exactly what he is.

“Have I done anything right?” Steve chokes out.

Sam sighs. He sounds impossibly tired. “It's still your call,” he says. “I know I can't tell you what to do, but,” Sam adds, and it sounds very much like a goodbye, “hiding him away is never gonna change the way the world sees him.”

Sam doesn’t wait for Steve to find his words before he disconnects the call, and it leaves Steve with an emptiness that stretches from his hands to his chest, and an excess of anger, directed at nothing within his reach.

He smashes his fist into the nearest tree, still holding the phone. It leaves a dent of young, yellow wood in the grayness of the forest. Needles and snow shower down on him from the tree’s shaking crown.

When he looks at them he finds his knuckles bleeding, the phone crashed in his palm. It’s not enough to numb anything. _You made a mistake, Steve_ , Sam's voice echoes in his head. _You made a mistake_. The blood in his ears is rushing, his hands trembling. He feels like he's going to burst out of his skin. There is the car only a few yards down the hill, and he slips and slides towards it, loose needles, wet with fresh snow, giving way under his feet. He punches until he can’t breathe anymore, glass bursting, and the car takes it stoically, and the metal bending under Steve’s fists finally does something. It’s only when he stops that the pain in his bruised knuckles finally reaches his brain, and when it hurts, it hurts good.

 

 

“What happened?” Bucky asks when Steve ducks back into the cabin, his sweatshirt soaked with molten snow, his hands beaten black and blue. Steve's entire body is trembling.

“Who did that to you?” Bucky gets up from his cot, suddenly alert, and Steve just looks at him, it’s enough of an answer. Bucky’s posture, taunt and ready to strike, crumbles instantly.

“You stupid schmuck,” Bucky says.

“It’ll heal,” Steve says, and falls down on his own bunk, balls his fist to try and control his shaking hands. It does nothing but increase the pain.

The look Bucky gives him settles somewhere between incredulity and exasperation. He wordlessly wets a piece of cloth in the sink and passes it to Steve.

“What about Sam?” Bucky asks.

“We’re fine without him,” Steve says, but the words carry nothing of the grimness he was going for. Instead they sound shaky. He doesn’t dare to look at Bucky, focuses on his hands instead, dabbing the blood from his knuckles with Bucky’s cloth. The sting is just enough to explain why his throat feels too tight, his eyes burning.

“Without him?” Bucky echoes. Steve pointedly keeps his eyes down, but Bucky sounds so incredulous, it shifts something inside Steve around. Suddenly it’s Bucky’s wide-eyed surprise that itches him most, more than Sam’s noble stubbornness or his own stupid choices.

“It was his fucking choice to stay out of this,” Steve snaps. “He made his call.”

He dabs harder at his knuckles. There’s shards of car paint in the wounds, and splinters of wood. He keeps his head down, Bucky will not see his tears, for whatever reason they’re coming.

“We don’t need him, Buck,” Steve says, “we’re good without him. We’re enough!”

Steve smashes the phone to the ground, screen and plastic casing shattered. When he looks up from it, he meets Bucky's gaze. Maybe seeing the rejection on Bucky’s face, the disgust, the incomprehension, will finally get the truth into his thick skull: they’re not. The two of them, they’ll only ever work as single elements in a grander scheme. _The two of them_ , singularly, a pair that adds up to a whole, is nothing but a selfish fever dream he’s chasing.

Bucky’s mouth is a thin line, his eyes dark. Steve feels himself crack. Everything, _everything_ is wrong. He could beg now.

Steve balls his hands to fists, the damaged skin stretching across his knuckles, bleeding fresh where he cleaned it before. He tries to breathe but he can’t. His chest feels too tight. He chokes on his own air, crying now, he can’t stop it.

He sits hunched over on his cot, his elbows braced on his thighs, his head bowed, and wills it to blow over, the sobs, the tears falling straight to the ground. He digs his fingernails into his palms and forces himself to breathe, his head feeling light, and the pain does nothing, makes it worse. Finally, he yields, and it washes over him.

It ebbs away the way it started, and when Steve can breathe again, and the stars in front of his eyes start to fade, the shaking subsides, he realizes there's a hand on his back, heavy, anchoring. Steve can't tell whether it's metal or flesh. Bucky sits next to him on the cot, his weight leaving a dent in the thin mattress, their knees almost touching.

“You okay now?” Bucky asks.

Steve nods and gets up, wets the cloth new, rips it in half and wraps each of his sore hands in a strip. Bucky watches him silently, and when Steve sits down next to him again Bucky just looks at him, both his hands, metal and flesh, in his own lap.

“Don't do that again,” Bucky says.

Steve swallows. His brain feels like cotton candy, his throat raw. “I'm sorry,” he says. “I couldn't help it, I don't know what --”

But Bucky stops him. “I meant Sam.” He gets up. “That wasn't your bridge to burn.”

“I didn't _want_ \--” Steve protests weakly, but Bucky just sits down on his own cot, drops his weight like he's tired of carrying it, his back towards Steve.

“Just don't do it again,” he says, folds his limbs onto the narrow bed, and doesn't say another word.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey you guys, thanks so much for the comments so far! You keep me going :')
> 
> Here's [a badly curated playlist](https://open.spotify.com/user/tiny-steve/playlist/2w3omzAPZK3pPOtAUnHMyQ?si=xkI4Bf77TqutPPbofpkPww) I made to write this. The trick to writing fucked up Steve Rogers is to listen to Designated Bucky Barnes Songs until they are about Steve.
> 
> And the teaser for chapter 6 is:
> 
> _Self-preservation has only ever lasted for Steve until he had his back against a wall._


	6. Six

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again there will be talk about suicide attempts in this chapter, so proceed with caution!

 

 

The cold swallows Steve whole, melts into his hot limbs, grasps for his heart. A darkness more perfect than he could ever have imagined, not the lack of light, but something deeper. Something more substantial, something crawling, seeping. It trickles through his veins and when the numbness finally comes it's not a relief.

Steve jerks awake, gasps for air, expects his arms and legs restrained, finds them free and his blanket sweat-soaked, his breath hanging in the air, a sliver of moonlight catching in it. The room is icy.

Steve breathes against the shaking, against the numbness still sitting in his chest. His entire core feels sore, it turns his stomach. It takes a while for him to settle down from it, a number of calm, deep breaths – to find the cabin around him quiet and undisturbed, the forest stretching beyond it, the stove cold, the fire inside burned down to embers. His hands are still aching, healing.

On the other cot Bucky sleeps on his side, curled up, his arms folded tightly in front of his chest, unaware that the cabin has filled with the chill of winter.

Steve sits up, allows his eyes to linger just for a second longer. Bucky's shoulders broad and tense, his metal arm gleaming, the skin knotty and irritated where it has been welded into flesh. Bucky doesn't move at all, except for his chest rising and falling. He doesn't look like he's dreaming. Steve wonders if it's peaceful, or if it's the same liquid blackness that swallows him at night. Not even nightmares, just more terror than one human can swallow leaking from his subconscious.

It's only when Steve gets up to relight the stove, his stitches stinging, that Bucky stirs. He finally blinks awake when the first timid flames warm the palms of Steve’s hands.

“Hadn’t noticed,” Bucky says, and sits up on the bed, turning towards the fire. His body is still folded tight, his shoulders look rigid, as if frozen in place. Steve adds wood from the pile, and kindles the flames into a good, strong fire. When the glow of it hits his face, washes over him and eases the cold from his bones, he closes the stove’s hatch.

“Are you still cold?” Steve asks.

Bucky shakes his head. He doesn’t look cold now, his posture has melted into something softer, tired. He brushes the hair from his eyes. “Are you?” he asks.

Steve shrugs. “Not now,” he says.

He wipes his hands on his thighs, doesn't know what else to do with them under Bucky's soft, tired gaze. If he tried, he could read it for concern, or something deeper, too. Bucky tired was the closest he ever got to that precious other kind of softness, the one he wasn't cut out for.

“Good,” Bucky says.

“Buck, about Sam –,” Steve starts.

“Leave it,” Bucky says, not harsh, but decisive. “Get some rest.”

Steve obediently moves back to his cot, fits his body back into the mold his weight has left in the mattress, and pulls the thin blanket up. The cabin is no longer cold, the fire spreading its warmth steadily throughout the room, and settling timidly in his bones, too.

“Next time it gets bad,” Bucky says in the darkness, only the stretch of an arm from Steve, his tone flat, “you tell me first.”

Steve settles back into his lumpy pillow, and allows the memory to swallow him whole. Bucky may have forgotten all of it, but Steve remembers for the two of them.

When they were kids and there was a war and the nights outside Italy were too wet to light a fire there were other ways to keep away the cold. They huddled together for warmth under a single blanket, the smell of wet wool weighing heavily, trying to catch their breaths between them to not waste any of its heat. They fit their knees and their boots together, their arms and hands, and their faces just inches apart. He knew Bucky’s body then, through layers and layers of coarse fabric, through mud and dirt and the numbness the cold left in his fingers. For a while, it was enough to keep the nightmares at bay.

“You tell me when it gets bad, right, Stevie?” Bucky had said. “You tell me when it's too much?”

And Steve had nodded, and promised, and then he had waited it out. Until it _really_ hurt, until he could be sure he wasn't just burdening Bucky with trivialities, with the itches and mild discomfort every soldier felt. He waited out cuts and bruises that healed within the blink of an eye, he waited out the first kill, easier than he ever thought it could be, and then the ones that followed, easier still, and then he waited out the casualties because he could tell from everybody's eyes they were feeling them just as keenly, and they weren't complaining. He waited everything out, and then, when he couldn't, when he had stretched himself to the point of tearing, he found himself in a bombed-out bar, with a bottle of Whiskey that didn't have any effect on him, and Bucky no longer alive to tell.

Steve rolls over and pulls the blanket tighter, listens to the rustle of Bucky settling back on his cot.

“I will,” he says, and knows he won't, just like he did then.

In the morning, Bucky is gone.

 

 

Steve puts together a makeshift breakfast from the apples Bucky got at the store, their skins crumpled, a protein bar and a glass of milk. It's easier now, eating. His wound has stopped throbbing.

He cleans up the kitchen set and airs their thin blankets before he folds them on top of the cots. Bucky has taken the shotgun. Steve cleans the stove and tries not to think where Bucky might be going. He bans the idea of Bucky abandoning him here, ridding himself of another dead weight, another pitfall, another fluke in his plan, to the very back of his mind, where it spins itself into a cocoon next to all the other unwanted thoughts.

The sun moves sluggishly up the pale sky, and then tips back towards the horizon way too soon. Steve watches the shadows of the fir trees creep across the thin layer of silver the snow left earlier, straight like pins on a sundial.

He peels back the patch of gauze in front of the bathroom mirror, the door open to fit the bulk of his body into the small room. His wound has closed completely, with no trace left of where the security guard’s knife tore his flesh apart, except a faint lightness of the skin where Bucky’s stitches sit awkwardly on the side of his abdomen.

His head still feels light. The day has done nothing to calm his nerves, Bucky's pointed absence rings louder than the memory of his words, or Sam's. He's finally alone. Is that it?

Steve splashes his face with cold water. The man staring back at him from the cracked mirror, with his reddened eyes and dark circles underneath, the beard growing in, looks nothing like the poster boy he saw in the elevator only days ago. His skin stretches too tight over his skull, taunt and waxen. Steve grabs his own chin and pulls it into a grimace, digs his fingers into his yielding flesh, likes the burn the stubble leaves. The kit Howard Stark outfitted him with in '44 contained a razor blade he encouraged Steve to use daily. _Don't let it have every last bit of you_ , Howard said, meaning the war. And Steve, drilled into obedience, made time every morning to scrape the fresh baby hair from his chin. It took him another century and a Smithsonian exhibition to realize that razor, like everything else, was not a gift, but part of the great American propaganda machine, just another tool to ensure they'd keep selling the dream of a towering hero, smooth like marble, untouched by war's ugly marks.

“You've healed,” Bucky says, a gust of icy wind and snow-flakes washing in with him through the opened door, chasing chills all over Steve's exposed skin. Bucky pulls the hood off his head, tosses the gloves into the corner.

“Where were you?” Steve asks, and feels the metal bands around his chest relax with the sight of him. It feels like he hasn't taken a proper breath all morning.

“Out,” Bucky says. “Air.” He puts the shotgun down on the kitchen counter. The jacket he hangs over the back of the chair is heavy with molten snow.

“Those need pulling,” Bucky says, nodding in the vague direction of the stitches sitting on Steve’s belly.

Bucky walks over to his cot and pulls a battered box from underneath it – the makeshift first aid kit that contained Steve’s painkillers and gauze when they first arrived. He rustles through it, and, coming up empty, he steps over to the kitchen counter and picks the smallest knife from the cutlery drawer, holds it out to Steve. Bucky's sweatshirt is wet in patches where the molten snow has soaked through the jacket's seams, and his eyes are soft. His shoulders don't hold any tension. This is an armistice.

“You do it,” Steve says, on a hunch.

Bucky’s eyes shoot up to Steve’s face, meeting his. Once the words are out Steve feels almost light-headed with the idea. Steve's hands are numb, he crosses his arms across his torso and still feels exposed. But the ground feels steadier under his feet than it has in months. There’s a moment of consideration, Bucky assessing Steve’s motives. Steve shows Bucky his hands, too bruised to hold a knife and cut with precision.

“I can’t do it,” Steve says, and then, scrambling to soften the edge of the order he just gave: “Please.”

Bucky hesitates for a moment, then he nods, and steps into Steve’s space.

The bathroom is too small for the two of them, but it is the only room with an undamaged skylight, not barred with cardboard and newspapers. With the sun up, it’s the brightest space in the cabin, even with the crowns of the fir trees towering high above them. Steve motions to sit down on the toilet seat, but Bucky moves him around with a decisive grip on his upper arm until Steve stands in front of it, and Bucky is the one who settles down.

Their eyes meet briefly, and Steve knows they remember the same thing: the last time they were close with a knife between them, on a bridge in D. C., when little more than chance was the reason either of them made it out alive. To trust Bucky with a knife again, with his belly bared and vulnerable right in front of his face, is, is…

“Fucking reckless,” Bucky says, bringing the knife up to the first stitch. He’s not looking at Steve, says it to himself as much as anything, could _mean_ anything, really, from the fact that he’s sitting in a bathroom to the fact that he’s doing this with a kitchen knife most likely seething with bacteria. Still, for a miraculous split second he sounds so much like the Bucky Steve knew, Steve finds himself lost trying to remember how to breathe.

“Don’t twitch,” Bucky says, and Steve forces himself to steady deep breaths. It only catches in his throat once, when Bucky rests his cold metal hand on Steve’s hip to anchor him in place. The knife in his right slides easily through the first thread.

Bucky pulls each stitch quickly and precisely, it doesn’t even sting. Meanwhile Bucky’s metal hand holds on tightly to Steve’s hip, the fingers digging partly into the fabric of his jeans, partly into flesh. The fingers resting on Steve’s skin warm progressively to the human touch.

Steve looks down, finds the top of Bucky’s head level with his own chest. Feels, if he dares, Bucky’s breath on his skin along with the touch of his fingers, working on the stitches. Steve focuses on the skylight instead, the chips in the tiled walls, the patches of damp coming through below the roof. Holds on tight to the cold sink in his back, determined to keep his hands from wandering.

Bucky’s work leaves nothing but a thin double line of tiny puncture marks to show for Steve’s injury. Steve has counted the stitches as Bucky pulled them, down to the last. The air is thin between them, and his knuckles on the edge of the sink are white beneath their bruises. Bucky puts the knife down, but he doesn’t let go of Steve’s hip right away. Instead he brings his face closer to Steve’s belly that’s rising and falling with each breath Steve has to remind himself to take, and examines the spot where the security guard’s knife struck.

Steve forces himself not to flinch when Bucky’s good hand comes up to touch the faint scar. Bucky’s look is appreciative in a way Steve pointedly decides is about Dr. Erskine’s masterful handiwork as opposed to Zola’s butchered job, and nothing else entirely. The serum has put him back together whole.

Bucky’s eyes flick up to Steve’s face. “When they did this to you, did you like it?”

Steve remembers him asking similarly, _Did it hurt? Will it last?,_ when Bucky first came face to face with his new body, but there’s something different about his tone now. Steve can’t quite put his finger on it. There’s nothing of the excitement Bucky showed at first, nothing of the trepidation that came later. Instead the question carries something almost akin to recognition. It's something Steve has never dared to stop and ask himself: When they did this to him, was it something given to him? Or was it something taken away?

Steve remembers how he had felt high in his head for days, probably a side-effect of all the extra oxygen pumping through his blood from this brand new set of lungs, and how people had suddenly noticed him when he walked into a room. How it hadn’t taken effort anymore to speak up and how people had seemed to want to listen.

Steve feels an unexpected smile curl his lips with the answer: “Yeah, I liked it.”

Bucky’s eyes stray from Steve’s face now, wander over his upper body, naked. He sits too close to take all of it in. Steve notices a crease forming between his eyebrows, and after a short moment of silence Bucky asks: “Did _I_ like it?”

Steve swallows. Suddenly his throat feels too tight for words. The one thing he could truthfully tell Bucky is his own best guess: Bucky hated it. He hated the mud and the cold, and he hated Steve’s new body, and for reasons he never explained, and that Steve never quite understood. It’s not like they ever talked about it, but Steve remembers the bitter streak about Bucky’s voice when they danced around it, and the edge in his eyes that could have been envy, or something more vicious. It had felt unfair then, Bucky passing judgment when all Steve was was _better_. He had almost forgotten about it.

“You don't remember?” Steve diverts.

“It's coming back in patches,” Bucky says. “But not completely.”

 _Near-complete recovery is the long-term goal,_ Dr Emily Forsythe had decided after reading through the files of Bucky's neurological evaluation, and Steve has always felt dread with it. In a streak of irony or fate, whichever one prefers, his own memories of the war are vibrant, more vibrant perhaps than anything else. They're etched into his mind permanently, he can almost replay them at will. They lurk in the far shadows of every room, in every sudden loud noise, they vibrate with every stranger's glance, every passing brush. He would lose them in a heartbeat if he could.

“So,” Bucky repeats, insistent. “Did I like it?”

“You never said,” Steve says. It comes out a bad lie.

Bucky huffs, and stands up. There is no room for both of them standing up in the bathroom. The cloth of Bucky’s sweatshirt grazes Steve’s chest, it’s too much, too sudden. Steve feels like the air is being stolen from his mouth. The edge of the sink digs painfully into his back when he tries to scoot out of the way and Bucky blocks him with a minuscule shift of his shoulders.

Steve has spent his entire life measuring distances. Back when they were kids and Bucky slept on the floor in front of Steve’s bed it would have taken getting up and an awkward shuffle of blankets and legs. And later, when they’d grown up, there was still an arm-length of cold air between their bunks in the dark-green dampness of their tent, and once that melted away there was the myriads of unspoken words between them. And then for a while he thought there was no fathomable force on earth that could return Bucky to him until one day, miraculously, there he was.

This, now. Steve feels like he’d fall if not for his hands still holding on to the sink.

“I don’t remember you like this,” Bucky says. It sounds harsh, like it’s an offense that’s been standing too long between them.

“I don’t remember you like this, either,” Steve retorts, the sink pressing into his back, and wishes instantly that he could crawl the words back into his mouth. Bucky’s eyes darken, his jaw tenses.

“It doesn’t matter,” Steve soldiers on head first, the only way he knows, forwards. Self-preservation has only ever lasted for him until he had his back against a wall. “I don’t fucking care if you’re different,” he says. “I don’t care about your scars, I don’t give a shit. You’re still –” _Mine_ , he wants to say, _my friend, my…_

Bucky fits his thumb and index finger against Steve’s chin, tilts Steve’s head to the side, forcing his eyes off Bucky’s face. It's just a nuance past playful, just enough pressure to hurt. From any other man Steve would’ve called it a threat. He trains every muscle in his body to not show alarm. This is Bucky’s human hand after all, his good hand.

“Why are you so soft?” Bucky asks, and Steve knows instantly Bucky isn’t referring to his skin or his body but his spine, twisted away from imminent confrontation at any given moment. The fact that he’s not fighting back, refusing to, even now.

Steve doesn’t respond, couldn’t get words past Bucky's hand on his jaw if he tried.

“I remember you rigid.” Bucky’s hand leaves Steve’s chin, wanders, and Steve dares to breathe again, bright stars welling up in his vision. When he looks back at Bucky, his eyes have left Steve’s face, focusing on his body instead.

“You were so small, your arms skinny enough to grab them like this.” Bucky tries to span his index finger and thumb around Steve’s biceps, to no avail. Steve can feel his lungs flutter like Bucky is transporting him back in time, there's not enough oxygen between the two of them. “I could lift you like this, you were light as a feather.”

Steve licks his lips, he feels enormous now, feels every bit of extra space he’s been taking up since the serum. How strange he must've seemed to Bucky at first, a giant. He remembers Bucky grabbing him, before, shoving him out of the way of cars when Steve didn’t hear them approach, he remembers Bucky holding him back when his brain was on fire and all he wanted was to get his hands on some _stupid asshole_ – he remembers counting the red marks Bucky’s fingers left on his arms before he went to sleep, before they could fade. Sometimes Bucky left bruises. Bucky never once touched him after.

He feels every hair on his body stand on end when Bucky’s hand moves again.

“I could count your ribs,” Bucky says. “Like you could play a tune on them, your Ma used to say.” He fans his hand on Steve’s ribcage, over the patch of new tender skin. Beneath there’s only bone and muscle now.

“She used to sing that song for you. _The pipes, the pipes are calling._ ” Bucky’s voice is too low to carry the melody but Steve remembers it, remembers his mother’s milk-white freckled skin and her Irish vowels, her soft husky voice singing it. _It’s you, it’s you must go and I must bide_.

“Your lips always went blue when we went out to the beach.” Bucky’s hand comes back up to Steve’s face, his knuckles grazing Steve's mouth. “And you were always shaking until your Ma wrapped you in a blanket and rubbed you to get warm.” He hesitates. “Or later I did.”

There’s a short silence and Steve knows Bucky remembers it, too, the summer he stopped touching Steve like that, like they’d grown up and it suddenly wasn’t proper anymore, the summer Bucky started hunting for jobs and worse, for skirts, and Steve, who still looked like a child, who's voice hadn’t even changed, tagging along aimlessly. And then the war that came too quickly, and everything changing.

“You never pulled your punches,” Bucky says, and there’s just the tiniest hint of accusation in his voice. “You never ran.”

Steve doesn’t say anything. He's overheating, and with his brain spouting an abundance of absurd impulses suddenly he can’t think, and besides, Bucky is right. He _has_ changed. There’s no arguing that.

“I can imagine I was mad when they took that from me,” Bucky says, his hand not leaving Steve’s skin. And then, as though it was nothing more than an afterthought: “I loved you like that.”

Steve’s breath catches in his throat. He has never heard Bucky say it, never about him, or anyone for that matter, the way he did just now. His brain is stalling around the word, _loved_ , the past tense. It’s Steve’s entire adolescence and the better part of his childhood rolled into five simple words. His past divides into memories with Bucky, and without Bucky, those with Bucky into loving Bucky, and Bucky not loving him back, not in the same aching, wanting way, and suddenly Steve can’t be sure if he remembers anything right.

“After the –” Bucky's voice catches. “After you came to the front,” he says, “there's not a lot I remember.”

It’s only when the silence stretches between them, growing heavy, that Steve realizes Bucky expects a response.

“You were different,” Steve says, scrambling for words in between the gravel in his mouth, the havoc in his brain, “but we all were, it was the war. It wasn't anybody's fault.” He wishes Bucky would look at him. “You were always with me, you wouldn't let me out of your sight. And then, after –”

Steve swallows against the pressure in his throat, forces himself to linger on the memory for just a moment longer.

“I missed you like crazy, Buck,” Steve strings together. The words don’t even begin to scratch the surface of what he felt, with Bucky gone and his hands empty and his chest screaming with a pain he hadn’t known before, not with his body fighting itself all through his childhood, not with bullets or knifes. He tries again. “I thought I’d go mad,” he says. “I thought I’d break apart. I broke apart.”

“You killed yourself,” Bucky says, and it’s not a question. Now he looks at Steve, his eyes bright and calm like tide pools. Steve doesn’t know how long Bucky has known, if he found out in the Smithsonian, or in the books they gave him about his past, or even earlier. It doesn’t matter.

“I tried,” Steve admits. Patriots hailed it a hero’s feat, the scholars called it a sacrifice, a smart, brave tactical move, when in truth it’s Bucky who is right. Crashing a plane full of explosives into the Arctic ice has never been anything but suicide.

“Did you try again?” Bucky asks.

“Never really stopped,” Steve says, and when Bucky's brow furrows, he adds: “Death didn't mean anything with you gone.”

“You won’t try again,” Bucky says. It isn't a question.

“No,” Steve says. “I won’t. Not now.”

Bucky nods.

Steve allows himself to look at Bucky for the first time properly, openly, not shying away from his gaze. He drinks him in, his face, hardly aged but beaten and rugged by time, the lines around his eyes, around his mouth, the dimple on his chin, the stubble longer than it has been in days, the constellation of freckles high on his left cheek, untouched by the seventy years of torture Bucky lived through.

“I won't give you up again, Buck,” Steve says, “I won't lose you again, I swear.” He watches Bucky’s expression shift.

Bucky’s eyebrows move into a frown, but it’s the corners of his mouth that transfix Steve more than anything. They are quirked upwards with the faintest idea of a smile, not more than the memory of one. Everything Steve ever wanted rests in the corners of that mouth.

“Why?” Bucky asks, quietly, and it's the way he asks, like he genuinely doesn't understand, that makes Steve pause.

It washes over him then with an intensity he's only beginning to grasp. Why has he done anything, really, in his life, from forged signatures on enlistment forms to suicide missions into enemy territory? The dishes, every Saturday night, _always_ , because Bucky was out on his dates, the stupid sketches of naked girls that would tease a brief, barking laugh out of Bucky even when they were short on rations and their socks hadn't been dry in a week. Brave faces through asthma attacks, white knuckle rides. A serum that would scramble and rebuild his entire metabolism from scratch, untested. And just days ago he killed a man for laying a finger on Bucky, and he feels no remorse.

“I've loved you forever, Buck,” Steve says. The words are easier than he ever thought they could be. Out here in the forest between just the two of them they are not a confession, they are not a declaration. They are just the truth. “I don't think I'll ever stop.”

Steve moves his hand, slowly as to not startle Bucky, and rests it on Bucky's cheek, a gentle mirror of Bucky's gesture only moments ago. Bucky looks at Steve, still frowning.

“There's not a lot of me left,” Bucky says.

“I don't care,” Steve says, with all the determination he can bring up against the giddiness welling up from his stomach, the ridiculous urge to laugh he can’t risk, not on the chance Bucky might doubt him on this. This is the only truth Steve knows, and despite the smile breaking on his face against his best efforts this is the most serious he’s ever been. “I don't care. You're here now. Nothing else matters.”

And Bucky lifts his hand and rests it on Steve's cheek. A smile breaks on Steve's face. This is how they've always been, mirror images, parallel lines, one following the other without fail.

“You never said,” Bucky says.

“I know,” Steve says. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I should've...” It tumbles out of his mouth then, without thinking: “I've wanted you before I even knew what that was.” He takes a deep breath, looks at Bucky, his impossible mouth so impossibly close. “And not just like a kid either.” He holds Bucky's gaze, and with how close they stand now, their bodies melting into each other, the last bit shouldn't come as a surprise to Bucky at all: “I still do.”

“You sure about this?” Bucky asks. His voice is low, but not teasing. Just asking, as if he still, with all the evidence between them, wasn’t sure. It makes Steve’s insides coil in a way that’s almost familiar, but then fundamentally different: This is Bucky there, Bucky in his space, moving closer, asking, offering, and the only things Steve can connect to _this_ are unspeakable, and hell yes, he wants them, he wants any and all of them.

“Yeah,” he says, and says it into Bucky’s mouth already.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's a teaser for the next chapter guys. Fair warning: We'll bump that rating up all the way...
> 
> _This is the Cyclone multiplied, this is a plane nose-diving into the Arctic._


	7. Seven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As you may have noticed the rating went up for this chapter. I'm giving this a tentative dubcon warning to be safe, our boys are not really in a position for "safe, sane and consensual" at this point (but they will be, I promise). Also please note there's mentions of past abuse in this chapter, I adjusted the tags accordingly! Be safe & enjoy!

 

 

Steve always thought they’d fuck like they used to fight. In his fantasies, the ones lurking in the early hours of morning, slipping through the cracks of his self-control, he imagined himself and Bucky wedged into each other, moving as one, knowing precisely where to touch and where to tease, breathing in unison. When they fought it was just the same. There was efficiency in the way they clashed. It was something Steve learned early on: you never know how well someone knows you until you give them reason to harm you. Strangers hurt you with a blunt strike, a far-fetched, broad insult. The few times they did fight Steve remembers Bucky hurting him with frightening precision, cutting sharp and poignant, and he remembers dealing out just the same way.

Wouldn’t it be marvelous if fucking was just like that, a game of push and pull, setting each other off, finding a breach in defense and exploiting it, although to a different end? With Bucky it would be like sparring, or dancing, or tactics, or running for your life through rain of ash and shrapnel.

It’s not like that.

They move over to the beds in a tangle, and everything, everything, is too tight. The walls are too close, the door too narrow for their bulky bodies combined, bruising them. They shove the cots together, and then Bucky is on top of Steve, hot, messy, and _so much_. He is heavy, pressing Steve down with his limbs, his lips. He kisses like a drowning man, and Steve, who remembers the way Bucky kisses from pretending _not_ to watch, from _not_ putting himself in the girls’ shoes, finds nothing familiar about it.

And then Bucky stops kissing him, buries his face in the juncture of Steve’s shoulder and neck instead, his stubble burning, and bares his teeth against Steve’s skin like he wants to eat Steve whole, crawl inside of him, merging their bodies. There’s nothing Steve can do but hold on, and wait for Bucky to come up again, his lips flushed crimson and his pupils blown. Bucky is hard against Steve’s thigh, his sweatpants less forgiving than Steve’s jeans. There’s something obscene about feeling Bucky’s cock through two layers of fabric, moving against him. Bucky wants this. Steve searches for the edges of Bucky’s mouth with his tongue, and finds them slack, because Bucky’s mouth has fallen open, panting. It takes both hands for Steve to turn Bucky's face towards him, make him look at him.

“Buck,” Steve says senselessly. “Buck, I'm here.”

He kisses Bucky eyes and mouth open, it’s pure instinct, Bucky's hands grabbing onto him like he could slip away any second. Steve's bruised knuckles are pulsing with healing harder now than they did before, hurting, but it doesn’t matter. When Bucky kisses him next, it's softer, closer. A hot finger caressing his cheek.

Bucky’s left knee fits perfectly between Steve’s thighs, and when Steve arches his back he can increase the friction in time with Bucky’s breath. Steve’s jeans are becoming an obstacle. When Steve wheezes under the strain, Bucky unceremoniously, one-handedly, opens Steve’s fly and shoves his hand (his human hand, his good hand) down Steve’s pants.

This is the Cyclone multiplied, this is a plane nose-diving into the Arctic. Steve feels every cell of his body prickle alive, every last trace of numbness chased away. His hips snap up of their own accord, desperately, into Bucky’s tight grip, and his sweaty right still clings to Bucky’s neck, his long hair cutting Steve’s fingers. Bucky’s sweatshirt is wet at the collar and the base of his spine.

“Buck,” Steve says, and crawls his hands under the edge of Bucky’s shirt, pushing it up, and Bucky understands, lets go of Steve’s cock (Steve looks down and sees himself, hard, and it is odd to think that Bucky’s hand was just on him), pulls the shirt over his head and drops it beside them.

Bucky’s skin is so much lighter than Steve’s, and so much more damaged. Every inch Steve explores down his back is riddled with scars, and then there’s his right side Steve doesn’t dare to touch, afraid what that might imply. Bucky watches Steve from under heavy lids while Steve’s hands wander over his back, blindly mapping out his scars, and his mouth falls open again with a gasp when Steve starts moving under him, shifting his thigh tight against Bucky’s crotch.

Bucky uses teeth kissing, and Steve forgets everything, forgets the forest and the news and the past, he whines and arches his back for more, and Bucky slides his hand back into Steve’s pants, wiggling them down for space (the jeans are stubborn and clingy, refusing to yield), and closes his fingers tight around Steve’s cock. His own hard dick caught against Steve’s hipbone, his thigh still between Steve’s, Bucky starts jerking him steadily. Steve’s torso is slick with sweat, beads running from his temple, and strands of Bucky’s hair are clinging to his cheek, his forehead. Between them they have caught a moment of heat in this century built from concrete and steel, in this forest that has turned icy, and that is almost stranger than the two of them together like this.

“Bucky,” Steve says again, because he knows he won’t last like this, and his brain is short on oxygen, and his face is flushed and desperate, and Bucky’s is just inches from his, “Buck. You’re the first.”

Bucky on top of him stills for a moment, and looks down, his long hair falling heavy into his face, wet strands obscuring his eyes.

“The first – ever?” he asks. His fingers are still on Steve’s cock, slightly slacker now.

Steve nods, his mouth suddenly dry.

When the meaning of the words sinks in, Bucky Barnes laughs for the first time in thetwenty-first century. It’s a sound oddly divorced from him, rippling dry from his ribcage, like pebbles on a dusty riverbed. He kisses Steve's mouth, and then he tightens his grip again.

“Should’ve said,” he says.

“Did now,” Steve tries, and loses the end of the two short syllables in a gasp when Bucky shifts his weight and presses his knee tighter against Steve’s crotch, against his balls in his jeans, and his hand speeds up on Steve’s cock, and he kisses Steve, soft and open-mouthed, catching Steve's panting breath. There’s nothing but sweat between them, sweat and damp fabric in all the wrong places, and it burns Steve’s skin. This is nothing like he imagined it, but this is Bucky, and this is good.

“Buck,” Steve says, wants to look at him when he comes, wants to see his face, but it happens too fast, and Steve comes thickly all over his belly with his eyes squeezed shut and Bucky’s head turned down, Bucky’s metal hand bracing itself on Steve’s shoulder while the orgasm shudders through Steve’s body, like Bucky is holding him down through a seizure.

Steve’s brain shorts out, and when he comes down from it Bucky has rolled off of him, lying on his back on Steve’s left, watching him. Steve rolls over, his limbs heavy and spent in a way he can’t remember ever having felt before, his jeans still bulked around his thighs, and fits their mouths back together. It’s simple and dry now. When Steve breaks away, Bucky’s gaze is still on him, assessing. Bucky makes no effort trying to hide the outline of his dick under his sweatpants, still hard.

Steve kisses his mouth again, lets his right hand wander slowly down Bucky’s torso, in what he hopes is a teasing move more than a clumsy one. He rests his hand on the bulge in Bucky’s pants, feels his dick hot through the fabric, and Bucky’s breath faster against his lips.

“Do you want me to?” Steve asks, and Bucky shudders under him, his hips urging upwards against Steve’s hand.

Steve finds the waistband of Bucky’s sweatpants and slides his hand under it, following the trail of coarse hair down. They threw the pillows out, Bucky’s head rests flat on the moldy mattress. Steve props himself up on one elbow to watch him, his other hand reaching down, finding Bucky’s hot cock and closing around it.

Bucky’s eyes widen with what could be arousal but looks more like panic, and it only dawns on Steve then that Bucky has experience with this, had it before the war and – Steve’s insides coil at the thought of it – after it, too. They wouldn’t have stopped at that, Steve realizes with a pang of nausea. They would have broken Bucky in every way they knew how.

“You want me to stop?” Steve asks, his voice suddenly shaky, his hand limp on Bucky’s cock.

Bucky breathes several shallow breaths before he raises his hand and rests it on the wrist of Steve’s right, still waiting awkwardly in Bucky’s pants, pushing it down. “Be slow,” Bucky says.

Steve makes sure to never look away from Bucky’s face once he starts moving again. He tries to make it good, he tries to make it slow, but the angle and the movements are unfamiliar, and his knuckles still hurt, and Bucky is looking at the ceiling, and down his own body instead of at Steve, as if he was searching for something that’s not in this room, but somewhere in the past. His breath goes fast and shallow, his chest heaving, his right hand holding on to Steve's arm, clutching desperately and hard enough to bruise.

“Buck,” Steve says, keeping the rhythm, “Buck, I’m right here.”

Bucky’s eyes snap to Steve’s face, and widen, and he reaches up with his left, anchoring himself in the nape of Steve’s neck, the metal almost hot to the touch. He holds on tight, and wheezes when Steve twists his wrist for another angle. Bucky's mouth is open now, panting, his eyes still searching.

“It’s me,” Steve says. “It’s me, Steve,” and remembers too late the triggers Bucky told him about. But Bucky’s mouth just tightens, and he breathes through his nose, and his body tenses, his hips rolling against Steve’s hand.

“Steve,” he gasps eventually, his stomach convulsing, and pulls Steve’s head down right next to his, pressed cheek to cheek, Bucky’s stubble raspy and Steve’s cheek burning hot, and Bucky’s jaw clenched tight when he comes, he clings to Steve through the shuddering, and finally falls back on the mattress, heavy.

Steve looks down at his own hand, black and blue, and the stained sweatpants, and Bucky’s cock going limp in it. When he looks up, Bucky’s eyes are open, and bright, and clear.

Steve heaves his bulky body up until he rests shoulder to shoulder with Bucky, his left arm caught against Bucky’s right, and raises his right hand, still sticky, to cradle Bucky’s sweaty neck. His fingers tangle with the long, wet strands of hair, and Bucky, quiet now, heavily rolls his head into the touch.

There is too much shoulder between them for Steve to kiss Bucky comfortably, but he tries anyways.

They are quiet for a long time.

“They told me you were dead,” Bucky says eventually, closing his eyes. “Right around the time they started putting me into kryo they told me you’d put a plane full of explosives into the ice.”

Steve looks at him, and there’s something about Bucky’s face that’s still off, like he is not quite there. The memory he’s caught in doesn’t look harmful, so Steve just watches him, holds him, and waits.

“Sounded like you, too. Dumb, noble son of a bitch crashing a plane into the Arctic for the greater good.” Bucky’s eyes flick open, and he finds Steve’s face. “You always wanted to die on your own terms, and if you could save the western world with it, all the better for it.”

“You remember all that?” Steve asks, but Bucky doesn’t stray from his tangent.

“Part of me wanted to break every bone in your body for leaving me there.” Bucky swallows. “Part of me admired you. I never could bring myself to finish it. I never had a good enough reason. I would’ve done it for you in a heartbeat, and then you were gone. I didn’t last long after that.”

Something in Bucky’s face shifts, like there is more to say, darker. He seems to consider the memory for a moment, then pushes it away. His face smooths out and then his eyes are on Steve only, there again, present.

“I can’t believe you’re alive today,” Bucky says, putting his hand back on Steve’s neck. “I can’t believe this is you, Steve.” It sounds almost like an apology.

“I’m just the same,” Steve says, and it’s not even a lie. Where Bucky is concerned, he is – sixteen, twenty-eight, a hundred years old.

“I know,” Bucky says, and there it is, finally, that smile around the corners of his mouth. It’s small and shy, just beginning to form, but it is undeniably there. Steve keeps himself from kissing it, wouldn’t risk chasing it away for the world. Steve is sweaty and flushed all over, and there are the corners of Bucky’s mouth finally curling, and Steve feels his face split with a grin so wide he can barely hold it. He feels like crying with it.

“We’re just the same,” Bucky says, and Steve says, “Yeah. Yeah, Buck, we’re just the same.”

Of course they’re not, they’re missing their Brooklyn backdrop and the shabby old flat, they’re missing years of their lives and their youths, a limb and entire patches of skin, replaced by scars. They are damaged goods, the two of them, but they are here now, together. In Steve’s memory they have not ever been anything but a crisis, even when there wasn’t a war, even when neither of them were supersoldiers, because all that time there has always been something burning, and always something unfulfilled. To trade that in for a trial looming, a dead body in an anonymous grave somewhere in New York City and the world brought up in arms against them feels almost fair.

“We’re enough now,” Steve says, with a smile tugging the edges of his mouth, and Bucky’s eyes slide open once more, steady on him for a long moment, until they fall shut again.

Steve stays still, measures the rhythm of Bucky’s breathing, until finally Bucky has slipped off, quietly, into deep sleep.

“We’re enough,” Steve whispers to Bucky’s bare, gleaming shoulder next to him. Bucky sleeps too tight to respond, but it doesn’t matter. There is no doubting now, there will never be doubt again on Steve’s side.

 

 

He wakes with a jolt because Bucky removes his warmth from under him, causing Steve's head to crash into the mattress.

“Fuck,” Steve says. When he peels his eyes open he finds Bucky standing at the kitchen set, stance taunt and upright, stark naked, the double-barreled shotgun wedged into his shoulder and pointed out of the window, his finger on the trigger. There's light in the cabin. It must be morning already.

With a minuscule jerk of the head Bucky indicates Steve to get dressed. That's when Steve registers the empty bottle swinging on its wire beneath the ceiling. Bucky is watching down the road for intruders.

“Two cars,” Bucky says the exact moment Steve's ears pick up the sound of engines and thick tires on a snow-covered road.

“Who?” he whispers.

Again Bucky just jerks his head in response: can't tell yet.

Steve climbs into his clammy jeans and sweatshirt, and scoots over to Bucky, positioning himself to take over.

Bucky glances at him, then wordlessly passes him the rifle. Steve peers through the cracks in the window where the newspapers have peeled off, but he can't make out movement down the road. The world outside has transformed completely, covered in a thick layer of blinding white snow. Behind him, he hears Bucky rustle for clothes, getting dressed.

Bucky just steps next to him when Steve sees them: two black vans, matte paint job, the inconspicuous kind, coming up the short drive to where their car is parked, with its windows smashed from Steve's fit of rage, now covered, like everything else, under a blanket of snow.

“Two cars,” Steve confirms with a nod. Bucky is close enough for Steve to hear his heart beat, the soft mechanical whir of his prosthesis.

“How did they know we're here?” Steve breathes, and Bucky puts a hand in Steve's neck, partly to steady, partly to signal for Steve to pass over the rifle.

That's when Steve hears the helicopter descending over their roof. Through the crack between the papers he can see the tell-tale wind picking up in the fir trees, strong enough to stir the snow on the ground. His hands clasp tighter around the barrel.

“Fuck,” he whispers. “What do we do?”

“You stay here,” Bucky says, and before Steve can say anything Bucky has crossed the room, thrown his weight against the cabin door to open it and stepped outside.

Something inside Steve freezes. Icy wind blows in through the door, mixed with snowflakes the helicopter is stirring up. Steve can see Bucky, framed by the door, raising his hands. And then Bucky steps out of view.

The cars have stopped on the snow-covered dirt road, blocking it.

They are probably surrounded already. The noise of the helicopter drowns out all sound. Bucky is gone.

Steve's hands shake on the barrel of the gun. His finger is slipping on the trigger, sweating.

The first van's door springs open. One man steps out, a dark blur in the whirling snow. His hands are free, no weapons. He climbs the steep ascend towards the cabin until he meets Bucky halfway. A moment of stillness. Then Steve watches them fall into a hug. He is numb and deaf, and he still hasn't dropped the rifle.

His mind is racing. He feels like throwing up.

Bucky and the man separate, and Bucky turns around to face the cabin. He raises his left hand, gleaming, an executioner's command.

Steve staggers back from the window, slides over to the cabin door. Snow is whirling through the opening. He props his back against the opened door, checks the shotgun. It's loaded through.

The air outside is roaring, or maybe that is just the blood in his ears. Steve takes one last look through the cabin, their cots shoved together, their sheets tangled, snow blowing across them. Then he steps out, the gun at the ready.

The white swallows him whole.

“Steve!” someone shouts through the roaring of the rotor blades.

“STEVE!”

The wind throws him off-balance, tears at the barrel in his hands. He's blind. He wouldn't have a clear shot even if it wasn't for the wind. The figures, Bucky and the other, have merged into one before his eyes. Steve takes a step forward. The ground is treacherous under his feet.

“STEVE, STOP!”

Steve takes another step. “Stand aside!” he shouts. “Stand aside!” But the wind snatches the words right from his mouth.

The figures separate again, looking completely alike in the whirling snow.

“BUCK!” Steve yells.

One of the figures raises a shotgun. Steve can clearly see the barrel, long, brought to eye-level.

There is no gunshot. He feels the hit dull in his shoulder. He looks down, sees nothing, numb heat spreading from the point of impact. His hands lose sense of touch first. He staggers on the uneven ground. Then he goes down and the world whites out.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Phew, friends, here it is... thanks for the comments so far, I am t h r i v i n g.
> 
> Here's a teaser for chapter number 8:
> 
> _Something has broken. Something is spilling._


	8. Eight

 

 

When Steve's eyes slide open there is a strand of unnaturally red hair waving in the draft of the open car window, treetops racing by, a voice saying, _sleep_. Shadows dancing. A soft bed that seems to spread endlessly around him, the prick of an IV line in his left forearm. When Steve finds his consciousness again amid drug-fueled dreams of snow and falling, it's Natasha's face that waits for him by his bedside.

“Where's Bucky?” is the first thing Steve asks when the drugs clear enough for him to find his numb, swollen tongue.

Natasha weighs her words before she answers, and the world comes rushing back to Steve in an instant, the swirling snow, Bucky, the dark vans, the helicopter, and, with it, panic. He tries to lift his head. “Where did they take him?”

“He's in D.C.,” Natasha says. “He's going to trial.”

“Who took him?” Steve asks. His brain gives the impulse to get up, but it can't seem to find his body.

“Shh,” Natasha says. “It was Sam.”

"It wasn't Sam," Steve says. "They had a gun."

"It _was_ Sam," Nat says, her voice uncharacteristically soft. "I was there, Steve."

Steve lets his head fall back on the pillow, a different kind of dread rising in his chest.

"Where's Bucky now?" Steve presses.

“He's with Sam,” Natasha says. “They're preparing with the Hawleys. He's lost the preliminary.”

Steve stills. The information sits odd in his throat, like a foreign object he's trying to breathe around. It takes him a second to figure out it's not about the trial.

“Sam, huh,” Steve says senselessly.

“He told me to tell you he's sorry about the blow dart,” Natasha says.

Steve swallows. He looks down to his left shoulder, no gunshot wound, not even the trace of one. The puncture from a vial would've healed in an instant. So it was Sam who mobilized a helicopter to get Bucky out of there. It was Sam Bucky hugged like an old friend, without a moment of hesitation. It was Sam who had Steve shot, tranquilized, and hauled away, a fluke in his plan. 

“What happened with Russia?” Steve asks

“We had slightly bigger things to worry about, with Barnes out God knows where, skipping bail.” She looks at him. “It was him who gave Sam your location, by the way. He wanted back for the trial.”

Steve knows her bedside manners, she wouldn't lie to him. It makes his stomach turn.

“I have to go,” Steve says. He gets up, his body responding only sluggishly to his commands. The room is too bright, the ground unsteady like they're at sea. Vanilla colored walls, neon strips under the ceiling, an impersonal print of an abstract painting framed on the wall. It reminds him too much of a room made up badly to look like an SSR sickbay, with cardboard walls and a whole different world beyond.

Natasha watches him as he unplugs the cables connecting him to the machines surrounding him, causing them to act up in a frenzy.

“You can't go,” she says calmly.

“Watch me.” Steve's head is swimming.

“You're recovering from a serious injury, you're dehydrated and sleep-deprived, if not for the serum you would've died of pneumonia a week ago, and you've had not one but two nervous breakdowns caused most likely by massive untreated PTSD,” she lists.

“Who would buy that?” Steve ask, and proceeds to rip the IV line from his wrist.

“That's not a story, Steve, that's your diagnosis,” Natasha says indignantly. She doesn't get up to stop him, just watches as Steve falls back on the bed when he tries to stand up, his legs feeling like jelly, his head like it's about to explode.

“You were horizontal for a week, I'd take it slow if I were you.”

“I have to talk to him,” Steve insists through the stupor in his brain, the rush of blood in his ears. He grasps on to the mattress beneath him with both hands, trying to steady himself, fighting the nausea welling up.

“You will,” Natasha says. “But first you'll rest.”

 

 

Winter has followed them to New York City on icy paws, blinding their windows and clouding the tops of the skyscrapers white. Natasha comes in with her cheeks frozen bright red and brings Vietnamese takeout in aluminum containers and stacks of unmarked DVDs with silent classics on them.

They share a bowl of Phô and watch Buster Keaton being rejected at the enlistment office, they watch the railway bridge go down and the train crash into the river. Steve can still smell the damp in Mr Schuesters makeshift basement nickelodeon and feel Bucky's hot left arm pressed to his right underneath the seats where they'd hide for another round, with Bucky in stitches over Keaton's deadpan expression. He can still feel Bucky's breath against his lips, too, and Bucky's weight on his rib cage. That was this century, days ago. It feels just as far away.

Natasha falls asleep during _Wings_ , but Steve watches every last second of it, and wonders if this was when Bucky decided to enlist, too.

 

 

Natasha has a lady sit at Steve's bedside who introduces herself as Dr. Denninger. She doesn't ask questions, but Steve is sure she expects him to talk anyways. So he gives her Christine Everhart's article to read.

“This isn't really about you though, is it?” she asks when she's finished. She reminds him of Peggy, her quizzical look, how her skin is soft with age around her jaw, and he is certain Nat didn't pick a British psychiatrist by accident.

Steve thinks back to the Smithsonian exhibit, the reels they played there. He remembers shooting them like it was yesterday, someone shouting instructions to him the silent film would later omit, and Steve gritting his teeth and acting his way through it, trying not to let the confusion show, a clumsy marionette. He thinks about the blurry, pixelated guy in the photograph, looking out of place in his own kitchen, he thinks of the confident lines on the cornflakes box, coming together to form a smiling, reassuring face. And then the razor in his way kit, that cut a guy's throat in '45 when their camp was ambushed at dawn.

Steve finds himself laughing. It tastes bitter on his tongue. “No,” he says. “It's not.”

 

 

“I didn't know he wanted to go to the hearing,” Steve says, when he next sees Natasha.

She has made herself comfortable next to him on the hospital bed. The credits are rolling, and Natasha lifts her head from where it rested against his shoulder.

“Did you ask?”

“Who _wants_ to go to trial?” Steve asks. “He should have told me.”

Natasha sits up, pulls her knees close to her chest. She looks at him blankly. Her eyes don't give a hint at any emotion. Steve knows that face. She uses it for interrogation, whenever she puts herself on the line. “You could've just asked him.”

“I thought—” Steve starts.

“Did you talk to Dr. Denninger about this?” Natasha asks.

Steve shrugs. “You mean, did I talk _at_ Dr. Denninger about this? I tried.”

Natasha scoffs. “You didn't have to sack her.”

“You didn't have to hire her,” Steve retorts.

Natasha shakes her head, silently exasperated.

“I'm really not the one you should be having this conversation with,” she starts. “But what the hell.” She takes a deep breath.

“What are you talking about?” Steve asks.

“You know, he's not you, right?” Natasha says. There's an edge to her voice now, something Steve can't quite place. “It's an easy mistake to make with what you've both been through, but he doesn't have to make your decisions and come to your conclusions, that's not how it works.”

Steve thinks he spots anger, but maybe that's too simple. Natasha sounds hurt. It makes Steve pause for a second.

“I thought I knew what he wanted,” Steve says.

“You were wrong,” Natasha says. She has let go of her legs, has let her guard down, and is looking right at him now.

“You know, I saw the cots,” she adds, when Steve doesn't say anything. “I saw the sheets.”

Against his best intentions, Steve finds himself blushing. He looks at his hands, fumbling with his bed sheet. “Nat, I --”

“You don't get to fuck him and call that healing, do you understand me, Steve? Look at me.” He forces himself to look her in the face. “I know the two of you go way back, but he's doing better, and you are refusing to get help. He's part of why you feel broken, I get it, but you can't expect him to fix you. Don't you dare burden him with that.”

Natasha's voice is sharp enough now to penetrate. He looks at her, desperate for softness.

“He wanted it, too,” Steve says, wishes it desperately. He hardly finds the voice for it.

“You can't know what he wants, Steve,” Natasha says harshly, “unless he tells you so.”

Natasha's words sink in like stones into Steve's gut. He thinks back to that bright afternoon, that night. There is what Bucky said, there is what Bucky did. But examining it, Steve can't remember what Bucky _wanted._ Like he can't remember what the security guard looked like, apart from a threat. Like he can't remember anything about standing in the whirling snow, a gun in his hands, except panic. Steve never thought to ask, he was so numb, still is. For the first time since he woke up from the ice he allows himself to feel the tiredness sitting in the core of his body, tearing at him. He has pushed himself through what feels like another eternity, the Battle of New York just an extension of the war he was fighting just the blink of an eye ago, then Bucky and the new century he brought in his wake, then his allies breaking like sticks under the pressure, and him, just him alone, soldiering through. The suit, the shield, have long become an exoskeleton more than anything, keeping him upright. It's only now that he realizes he's lost his sense of touch with it.

The question falls from Steve's lips before he can stop it: “Do you think I hurt him?”

“I don't know,” Natasha says, refusing, as always, to let him off easy.

“Do you think that's why he left?” Steve can feel the nausea welling up again, the panic that starts cold in his fingertips and spreads across his system in the span of seconds.

Natasha doesn't respond.

“Nat, I--” His voice breaks.

“He might just need time,” Natasha says, reaching out for him, grabbing his shoulder, and it's the kindest thing she has said in days.

Steve looks around the room, panicked, not finding anything that could hold his attention long enough to distract him from the sickness welling up, washing over him like a wave heavy with the gravel it stirred up, weighing him down, drowning him. The idea that Bucky might have left because of him, that he might have scared him off, or worse, hurt him...

“I don't know what to do,” Steve says. His breath is going heavy. He can't look at Natasha, focuses on his hands tangled with the sheets instead. The white is blooming in bright spots in his vision. “I don't know what to do,” he repeats. “I don't know what to do, Nat, I don't know...” His breath hardly carries the words now.

“There's help, Steve,” Natasha says. When he looks at her, her expression has softened. She is kneeling next to him on the bed, takes his empty hands in hers. The pain is unbearable now, tearing his insides apart. He can't breathe. His lungs feel like they are filled with burning mortar. “You can get help,” Natasha says close to his ear. “It's not too late.”

That's when Steve starts crying. Not like he did before, like a curse. This is relief. He feels his face contort, his jaw clench, he gags and spits, but the gates are finally open. Something has broken. Something is spilling.

“Put your head between your knees,” Natasha instructs calmly, bending his back forwards with a gentle but commanding touch to the nape of his neck. “Breathe.”

And Steve heaves, and sobs, and screams. And then, finally, he breathes.

 

 

Natasha drives him upstate the next day. The snow is immaculate this far north. The ice clings to every surface it can find, transforming the world into one that looks like it could shatter to the touch. The house is a functional, one-story concrete structure, Steve guesses from the Sixties, because to him it looks futuristic, even though algae and moss have left their traces on it. It ducks between the soft hills and trees heavy with snow at the edge of town, and if not for the polished brass sign at the door Steve would surely have driven past it.

Steve's cheeks feel raw from crying when he steps out of the car, the cold biting every bit of exposed skin. Natasha has outfitted him with a brand new puffy down jacket.

“You'll be alright here,” Natasha says. It's not a question.

Steve looks at her, her cheeks and nose frozen red, shrugging herself deeper into her parka. He tentatively allows himself to believe her.

 

 

He doesn't expect the clinic to be ready for him. He doesn't begin to understand the mess inside of himself, only knows it's the product of more than what one human being should be able to survive. But the doctors are patient with him, and Steve soon learns there's a flavor of pain for everything, and it all adds up, and it doesn't take much to break a person. For almost everyone else Steve talks to, it has been one loss, one traumatic experience, one war. And for some it has been nothing specific at all, just life. The pain is just the same.

There's something soothing about how he falls back into military rhythm within days. Tight bedroll, set hours for food, talk, sleep – but this time, for once, there's no death attached to it, no fear, no threat. Just calm. It doesn't take much for the doctors to pry him open. Once Steve understands he's allowed to talk, allowed to share, without judgment or the fear of burdening someone else, he spills.

And while Bucky takes the stand for the first time down in D.C. – Steve sees the courthouse drawings on the news, listens to the report until the 9pm watershed cuts the power from the TV screen – Steve draws loops on lined paper until finally the words start flowing. He writes it all down. He writes, in a way, all the letters to Bucky he never had the chance to write during the war, when paper was scarce and time scarcer. He draws, too, even if the only lines he can put together are those of Bucky's face, in a strange mixture of the boy he knew before the war and the man he's faced now, only weeks ago. Weeks turn into months before Steve realizes time is passing at all.

It is the hardest thing Steve has ever had to do. The days shorten down into glimpses of light and the nights seem to engulf everything. And Steve sits down every day, and learns to allow his past a little closer. All this time he thought he was the man who never ran. In truth he has never really stopped, until his trauma grew so heavy it weighed him down, and everyone around Steve with him. He tells the doctor about the way his hands start to shake in the accelerating subway when the air presses too tightly against the windows, roaring, and too tightly in his lungs, too. The way he feels strangers’ glances in his neck, knowing deep down to his bones that to some of them his mere existence is a threat. And how he’s spent every single one of his birthdays in a basement since the war, because fireworks are just too much. Even if they are all for him now, like scrawny Bucky predicted, with patches on his knees and a smile around the edges of his mouth back when they watched them from the fire escape of their place in Brooklyn.

He tells the doctor how crazy it is that he can heal every broken bone in his body in a matter of days, but he can't seem to heal his brain from the things he's seen. It reminds him of confession, and with every story he tells, he sheds a little of the shame, a little of the weight, and brings himself one step closer to absolution.

Natasha sends him chocolate and his favorite instant ramen from the Chinese supermarket on the corner. Sam sends him long letters, detailing how the trial is going, a tentative hand stretched out for Steve to shake. Bucky sends a postcard.

It arrives one day at breakfast, looking out of time between the flashy greeting cards and padded envelopes. It's just a carton rectangle, the corners bent from being handled along its journey, a stamp in the upper right corner, and Bucky's wide, loopy handwriting covering both sides. Steve received two of those postcards back in Brooklyn, only two of them, before he shipped off to Europe himself, a lifetime ago.

Bucky doesn't mention the trial, just like he never mentioned the war. He writes about nice things, like the exotic food Sam orders in, and the veterans who write him to thank him for his service. About a movie he watched, and the place he thinks he might get for himself. And then, when the writing turns crammed and lopsided on the far end of the back side of the card, he writes:

_I hope you're not cold up there. You were the first warm thing I knew in this century x B_

There it is, plain blue pen, slightly smudged, on paper, for the world to see, not even an envelope guarding it. And it makes Steve feel warm inside in a way that has nothing to do with Nat's functional clothes or the way the nurses tend to turn the heating up just a notch too far. He keeps Sam's letters locked in his bedside table, still, even here, dutiful to the point of paranoia about spying eyes. But Bucky's card he keeps under his pillow, cool to the touch at night when he slips his hot hand under it.

He fights his therapists about it. _It doesn't make sense_ , he insists, and every last one of them hides a smile and tells him to wait until it does. He loses sleep over it, even in the pitch-black, soundless darkness of the clinic, where nothing should be keeping him awake. Nothing Bucky did since he came back made any sense. Running with him only to keep his distance. Sleeping with him only to leave. Surrendering only to stand trial. And now the postcard. It's like he loves Steve and despises him in the same instant.

“Look at what _you_ did,” his doctor says towards the end. “Did any of that make sense?”

And Steve thinks about it. He has loved Bucky all his life and until very recently would've rather swallowed his tongue than lose a word about it.

“I think it's about time the two of you had a conversation,” she says.

 

 

His letters to Bucky fill a binder stacked with lined paper when the snow finally thaws. It's one of the few things he takes when he gets into Nat's car on a foggy morning in March.

“Wanna get some real food?” she asks.

Steve looks ahead through the windshield, where the slush-covered edges of the road seem to meet in the far distance.

“Can we go to D.C.?” he asks.

Natasha gives him a sidelong glance, paired with a small smile.

“We sure can, Captain,” she says, and ignores the exit towards New York City, sticking to the 81, southward bound.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All this time I thought writing Steve Rogers suffering was the cathartic experience I was looking for when really it was Steve Rogers getting therapy :') Thanks for sticking with him (and me) through this. The final chapter will be up some time next week!
> 
> Here's a teaser:
> 
>  
> 
> _This is a love story, after all._


	9. Nine

 

 

There's nobody home at Sam's house.

“He's not answering his phone either,” Natasha says, when Steve returns to where she has parked the car on the curb. “We could always check into a hotel, try again later?”

“Or we could try the courthouse,” Steve says.

Natasha looks at him through the rolled-down window.

“You sure you're ready for that, Rogers?” she asks, a critical crease on her forehead.

Steve allows himself a moment to consider it. The press, the lights, the questions. The journalists, the experts _._ He takes a deep breath.

“I wanna see him,” Steve decides. “Both of them.”

“Alright,” Natasha says, and opens the door for him while he walks around the car. “The courthouse it is.”

 

 

There's a couple of OB vans outside the courthouse, lined up, their satellite dishes aligned south like sunflowers in front of the brute sandstone facade of the courthouse. There's perimeters set up, there's every sign of a bustling journalistic beehive. But the area is quiet. Steve wonders briefly if everyone just stepped out for lunch, before he realizes that's probably what it looks like when court is not in session. Nothing to see, the vultures have abandoned the carcass – for now. Some have locked their folded chairs and pedestals to the metal railings with bike locks, securing their first row spot. When Natasha guides him past it, Steve imagines this is where Bucky walks in when there are hearings, through flashlights like flak fire. Steve pulls his hood tighter over his head, even though nobody's watching.

The courthouse is built to petrify. Steve can't find another purpose for the imposing architecture, solid marble pillars looming, supporting a cassette ceiling that looks too heavy for the pillars to hold. There's only few people in the foyer, but the sound of their footsteps multiplies by the hundreds in the empty space above their heads, bouncing between the pillars and the polished walls. Steve cranes his head, but Natasha pulls him along. They pass security, and take one of the elevators up.

Steve would be lost without Natasha, quite literally. The upstairs corridors are less stately, more clinical, and they seem endless. The carpet swallows every sound and makes the air smell perpetually dusty. The numbers of doors lining the corridors is overwhelming, and the thought of trying every last one of them to find Bucky and Sam even more so. But Natasha knows where she is going. She navigates the labyrinth with an ease that makes Steve suspect she's been here before.

“I sat in a couple of times,” Natasha says, before he can ask.

Steve begins to wonder where they are going, when Natasha stops in front of a nondescript door. She knocks before Steve can ask her to let him catch his breath.

The small, black woman answers almost immediately. Steve recognizes her instantly: That's Bess Hawley, the younger of the two lawyers Stark hired for Bucky.

“Mrs Romanoff,” she says, sounding surprised. Then she looks past Natasha and her serious face transforms into a surprised smile. “And Mr Rogers.”

She has a piercing gaze that makes Steve suddenly feel nervous, although there is nothing unfriendly about it. She offers him her hand.

“Bess Hawley, pleasure to finally meet you.” He takes it, and her grip is strong. Somehow, he expected no less.

“All mine,” Steve says, his back straight, his mouth dry.

“We're in the middle of a meeting,” Bess Hawley says, pointing back into the room. She has stopped the door's closing mechanism with her heel, holding it half-ajar behind her so as not to disturb whatever is going on inside. Steve feels his heart flutter. He wishes he could catch a glance, and simultaneously dreads her opening the door all the way.

“We could come back,” Natasha offers.

“No, no, please,” Bess Hawley says, “by all means, stay. This concerns you, too.”

She looks at Steve. Natasha, too, turns around to him. An instant flash of words learned at the clinic pops up in his brain: _Remove yourself from stressful situations. Look after yourself first. Nobody will fault you for declining politely._ He can't find a single word to say.

Before he can make up his mind, Sam steps into the door frame behind Bess Hawley.

“Is there a problem?” he asks, his expression stern. For a second Steve feels a jolt of fight-or-flight, pure instinct, but then Sam's face softens when he recognizes Natasha, and behind her --

“Steve,” he says.

“Hi,” Steve says. There's a moment that stretches between them, with Steve's heart fluttering in his chest, hoping for a truce, at least a cease-fire. He's not sure he deserves one.

Sam turns around to Bess Hawley and Natasha. “Sorry, could you give us a minute?”

 

“I'm sorry,” Steve says, as soon as Natasha and Bess Hawley have closed the door behind them. His voice sounds hollow in the dull silence of the corridor. There is no sound apart from the neon strips' electric hum under the ceiling. Steve wanted to be diplomatic about this, but there is really nothing else to say, and the need to say it has grown urgent upstate.

Sam leads Steve a couple of steps away from the door, leans to the wall with one shoulder. Steve mirrors the pose and instantly feels less exposed, the steadiness of the cool plaster against his arm offering support.

“What for?” Sam asks.

“Everything,” Steve says, desperately. “I'm so sorry.” He had words prepared at some point along the long drive down to D. C., but he can't find them now. He keeps repeating himself. “I'm so sorry, Sam.”

He looks at Sam, hoping for something, anything. There's a smile on Sam's face he didn't expect.

“Look at you,” Sam says. “Did you learn that in therapy? Apologizing?”

Steve can't find an edge to that smile, and it makes him brave.

“It was one of several lessons,” he says, tries the words out between them. He can't remember when he last made a joke.

Sam, blessed, chuckles at it.

“Are you mad at me?” Steve asks, because that's the second thing that has kept him from sleeping for months, the other thing he could only really sort out face to face with Sam.

Sam frowns, and takes a second to consider it. “I was for a while,” he says.

The hallway, this dull, bureaucratic setting, feels like the wrong place to do this, but Steve made a promise to himself when he was up north, and he's going to keep it.

“I'm sorry,” Steve says again. “I put you in a tight spot and blamed you for getting mad at me for it, that wasn't okay. I should have told you earlier.”

“I could've been better about it, too,” Sam says.

“No, you were right,” Steve insists. “I wasn't ready to hear it, but you were right. Everything you said. I needed that.”

Sam looks at him with a quiet expression Steve can't quite find a word for. It stirs something in him, almost like a memory.

“All better now, huh?” Sam says.

Steve shakes his head. “Still working on it.” He isn't finished.

“There was something I needed up there,” Steve says. It's still hard to find the words that really ring true, even after he's spent months doing little else in front of his therapists. “There was something I needed that I shouldn't have asked of you. Or him.”

Sam nods.

“I should've gotten help sooner,” Steve says.

Sam stops him with a determined shake of his head. “You did it at your own time.”

“But it cost all of you.” Steve looks at him. “I want to make it better, I want to _be_ better.”

“Listen, Steve,” Sam says. “I'll let you apologize. You get to apologize for all the shit you pulled, for not communicating. You even get to apologize for leaving me with the press, the fucking vultures. But you don't get to apologize for this. Not for how you are. Someone else has to answer for that, somewhere up there or way back, or wherever. Not you.”

Steve nods, and Sam reaches out and grabs his shoulder, smiling, and Steve finally, for the first time in months, feels at balance again. It's like someone picked up his wayward, tumbling core and put it right back in his center.

“You _are_ better,” Sam says. “And I'm proud of you, Steve.”

And that's it, that's the word Steve was looking for. Pride. He didn't immediately recognize it, because he didn't think there would be a time again when people wouldn't pin their pride on him like a medal he didn't deserve. At best, it had been a challenge to grow impossibly bigger, better, stronger than he was. At worst, a curse, his cross to carry to his own inevitable Golgotha. It used to be different, before. He remembers when pride felt like a gift that asked nothing in return. Erskine once looked at him like that, when Steve was still scrawny, and then it didn't feel like a knife to his gut. And there was a time when Bucky's pride didn't sting, before the war. And now. The way Sam looks at him now makes him feel nothing but loved.

“Thank you, Sam,” he says, and he means it, and it's just words, but it accounts for everything.

 

 

Steve finds Bucky in the courtyard. It's where Bucky goes for smokes during the long planning sessions with the Hawleys, and to get away.

Steve gets a taste of it when they try to run down three months of trial for him after he returns to the room with Sam, a story full of terms Steve has never heard, and punchlines he doesn't understand. The one thing he does understand is that they don't seem to have the answer to the most pressing question, either: Is Bucky winning?

Sam puts a hand on Steve's knee when he notices it bobbing under the table.

“He'll be in the courtyard,” Sam whispers to him. And there is no stopping Steve then.

 

There is a sad tree growing solitary from a cubic container of gravel in the center of the courtyard. Bucky sits on the sandstone curb running around it, smoking, his legs bent in front of him. His hair has grown since Steve last saw him on TV, on the first days of trial. He has it tied to a ponytail in the nape of his neck. Steve's heart is beating in his throat, not fluttering now, but deep and thumping, reminding him that he's alive.

Bucky registers the movement when Steve steps into the courtyard through the double glass doors and snuffs the cigarette on the curb.

“Hey,” Steve says, and Bucky looks up.

There is a moment when time stops, Steve is sure of it, between the moment Bucky locks eyes with him, and the instant he recognizes Steve, a span of milliseconds that feels like an eternity.

“Steve,” Bucky says, finally. It falls from his lips like a sigh of relief. It's one fluid motion, then: getting up, crossing the distance between them, and wrapping Steve in a hug that pushes the tension from his body along with the air in his lungs. Steve feels himself folding against it, giving up any and all defenses. He wraps his arms around Bucky's torso, his back broad and warmed by the sun under his hands, and can't believe his luck: the two of them in the same place, at the same time, now, alive, and nothing standing between them. It feels like a singularity, an impossible universal coincidence.

“You're back,” Bucky says when he lets go, and there's no excuse now for Steve to not look at his face, drink it in. Bucky wears his hair smoothed back. He's shaven clean, sharp. He's wearing a suit, Steve realizes, and well-cut, too. He looks more like James Buchanan Barnes than Steve has ever known him. The close shave, the modern, slim tie – Steve's sees the Hawley's advice in it, and maybe a touch of Sam's. It's all wrong, of course. Bucky never was a meticulous dresser, despite his reputation. But it fits with the old army photograph that went through the press: immaculate lines, every hair combed neatly into place. James Barnes of the Smithsonian, James Barnes of the memoirs and the comic books looks exactly like that.

“Yeah, I'm back,” Steve says, and feels himself smile again, welling up from deep down. He couldn't do a thing about it if he tried.

Bucky hasn't severed the connection between them completely, still has his left hand resting on Steve's side.

“You look better,” Bucky says.

“I am,” Steve says, echoing Sam's words from earlier.

Bucky lifts his hand and nudges Steve's jaw, where he has allowed the beard to grow in during his stay up north.

“Suits you,” Bucky says, and Steve feels himself blush like a schoolgirl.

“You don't look so bad yourself,” Steve responds in an attempt to hide it.

“I hate the fucking suits,” Bucky says. “They used to cut them looser.”

They did, Steve remembers the baggy slacks the men used to wear, with heavy pleats down the front and back that Bucky never got right, but Mr Schuester's maiden sister always did.

“You wanna get out of here?” Steve asks.

And Bucky looks around at the empty windows lining the courtyard, and the CCTV cameras in every corner, and up at the patch of perfect blue sky framed by sandstone. He goes to pick up his half-smoked cigarette from the curb and wraps it delicately in a tinfoil gum wrapper before he looks back at Steve.

“Yeah, let's go,” he says.

 

 

They walk down to the Mall, and then further down towards the Potomac. Down by the water the air is mild. The cherry blossoms will be out in a couple of days, and the sun feels warm even though it is already angled low in the west. Steve turns his face towards it, his eyes closed, soaks it up. The air is full of scent and finally, finally feels breathable. For the first time in months he doesn't feel cold.

Bucky takes off his suit jacket and rolls the sleeves of his dress shirt up the way he used to when he helped unload Mr Schuester's beer carts in front of his shop for a couple of dimes. Now his arm is gleaming in the sunlight. It stirs something deep in Steve's stomach, a jittery feeling he can't quite control.

“I'm not in hiding,” Bucky declares, and Steve nods, although the jittery feeling isn't going anywhere.

“Steve, relax,” Bucky adds, and Steve realizes he has unlearned the mask up north, the poker face. He can't hide his feelings now, he's transparent. It feels delicate, a tender newness he doesn't quite know what to do with.

“Nobody's gonna recognize you with that thing on your face anyways,” Bucky says, meaning the beard. He blinks at Steve against the setting sun in Steve's back and tugs gently at Steve's hood. “You can take that off, too. You look like a hacker.”

Steve sheepishly removes the hood he put on when they left the courthouse, more an action of habit than real fear.

“A hacker is someone who --” Bucky starts.

“I know what a hacker is,” Steve says, a burst of relief with it. Bucky is joking. “Jeez, I've been here longer than you have.”

“Not technically,” Bucky says, deadpan.

Steve looks at him, and Bucky grins. He has unwrapped the cigarette from his gum wrapper and lights it, his metal hand shielding the timid flame protectively. Steve can't believe they're joking about this. He still can't believe they're here at all.

“How do you just move on like that?” Steve asks, softly. He makes sure there's no edge to his voice. If anything, it's awe.

“How do you not?” Bucky returns.

They stop at the water's edge, looking out to where the sun is almost dipping below the treeline, coating the sky and the water in reds and pinks. Bucky blows his smoke onto the light breeze that carries it away from Steve and Steve figures it makes sense. What Steve tried so hard to hold on to was already gone, and there is no going back, only forward. _To the future_.

Steve remembers Bucky's giddy excitement about the world fair, the dime novels he read weeks in advance about flying cars and eternal gardens and golden cities in the skies... utopias they'd never live to see. It's hard to reconcile with how the world works now. There used to be a time when people where excited about the future. And it's certainly some of the things Bucky hoped it would be, with worldwide instant communication and intelligent maps and a freedom to be Steve wouldn't have dared to dream back then. But it's also immeasurably darker. He sometimes thinks the way they used to look at the future is similar to the way people today look at the past. The way they don't see a war, and millions of lives lost, when they look at the old reels of Captain America. They see a time of legend, when there were heroes, and they get wistful. They don't see the strings.

“I think I'm getting out,” Steve says into the silence between them. They're standing side by side at the balustrade separating the path from the water, their upper arms almost touching. As he loses the glow of the setting sun on his face, Steve begins to feel Bucky's warmth radiating. His arm is whirring softly, a mechanical undercurrent to his heartbeat.

Bucky looks at him. “Out?” he asks.

“Not the woods, this time,” Steve specifies, thinks maybe if he keeps his tone light enough he can hold on to the easiness they had only minutes ago. “Brooklyn, for a start. My own place. A real job.”

“Have you told Stark yet?” Bucky asks.

“He doesn't get a say,” Steve says. “What do you think?” he adds, because Bucky's face is inscrutable.

Bucky takes his time, looks down at where the water's edge is lapping at the marble wall, the water tinted darker by the minute. Then he looks back at Steve.

“It's good,” Bucky says. “It's good, for sure. Could make you happy.”

But there's still something unsaid. Bucky looks at their arms lined up on the balustrade, their hands just inches from each other. He lifts his other hand, the left one, and lets his metal index finger trail slowly across Steve's lower arm resting next to Bucky's right, until the fine golden hair on it stands on end.

“I wanna do that with you,” Bucky says. His eyes flick up to Steve's face, who has been staring at Bucky's left hand, mesmerized, his throat dry. He can't quite pinpoint what it is, but there's an impossible sadness in Bucky's voice that belies the closeness between them, the easiness with which Bucky bridged their last distance only moments ago.

Steve picks up his own right hand to meet Bucky's left between them. When metal meets flesh, Bucky stills, his arm whirring, but he doesn't pull back, and Steve intertwines their fingers so he won't. He needs to make this count. Bucky's hand is curiously cool in his, but unmistakably alive, the metal parts moving against Steve's skin.

“I wanna do _everything_ with you,” Steve says, and makes sure to look at Bucky proper, so there's no way for him to misunderstand. Their upper arms are touching now, warmth catching between them. Bucky is still looking down.

“I'm sorry if I hurt you,” Steve says. His heart is racing in his chest.

Bucky looks up. “You never hurt me.”

“In the cabin, I thought – I didn't know if you -” Steve rambles, and falls silent.

“You didn't hurt me, Steve,” Bucky says. “That's not why I left.”

“Why did you leave?” Steve asks.

Bucky takes a deep breath, looks out at the water. A couple of strands have slipped from his ponytail, obscuring his face. He swallows hard before he responds.

“I didn't think it'd be this bad,” Bucky says. He listens to his own words and laughs, short and dry. “I don't know what I was expecting, I killed their siblings and parents and children.” Bucky looks at Steve. “I can't forget a single fucking one of them, and they're making sure I never will.”

Steve tightens his grip around Bucky's hand, and lets his thumb graze the metal until it feels like flesh, warm and smooth underneath his steady motion. It's not an answer, but it explains everything.

 _Everything's a fucking act_ , is what Bucky had said. Steve finally understands.

With a breath, Steve lets go of a tightness in his core he wasn't aware he was still holding. It doesn't even come as a surprise, not really.

“You remember,” he says, and it's only when he says it that he understands it's not a question anymore, and neither is it an accusation. He's known all along, deep down. Half a year ago it would've stung to hear Bucky say it. After everything they've been through, Bucky's quietness for months on end, it would've felt like a deception, when really it's just a fact, and more than that: It's Bucky's truth.

 

“I couldn't put it on you,” Bucky says. “You understand that, right?”

“Yeah,” Steve says. When he thinks about it, there's really nothing to understand. Bucky has put himself in harm's way to protect Steve for as long as he can remember. They're both like that, putting the other first no matter the cost, they've been like that stubbornly, recklessly, for just under a century now. If nothing else it must've been instinct, muscle memory.

“I couldn't ask you to listen to that. You couldn't stomach it,” Bucky says to the darkening water spreading in front of him. “I saw that.” Bucky lets go of Steve's hand, and sets it down on the cool marble balustrade. He takes a deep breath, and Steve can feel him brace his shoulders.

“I won't make you fight another war for me, Steve,” Bucky says. “I promise.”

Steve studies Bucky's profile, darker now, determined. “They parade me around like a prize boxer,” Bucky continues. “They put me in their stupid suits, and ask me their stupid question, like me telling them what I did, what they did to me, makes anything better for anyone.” He breathes deeply. “It  _is_ another fucking war, Steve, that's exactly what it is.”

It's only then that Steve recognizes the scarred skyline on the other side of the water: They have torn down the remains of the Triskelion. All that's left are the stumps of the trees the Helecarriers crashed into, snapped off like matches, and a curiously empty patch of darkening sky above. Bucky is staring right at it.

“And here I am, and I still wanna give them a fight,” Bucky says. “Like that's all I'll ever know. I can't shake it otherwise. I need them to tell me I'm not guilty, I need it on paper. And then afterwards maybe I'm free.” Bucky finally turns to look at Steve, and when he does, there's a desperate look in his eyes. “Is that crazy?”

Steve shakes his head. He lifts his right hand to Bucky's cheek and turns Bucky's gaze away from the water, makes sure Bucky looks only at him now. Bucky rests the weight of his head in Steve's palm as if he was tired of carrying it.

“That's not crazy,” Steve whispers.

And Bucky finally unlocks their shoulders and turns towards Steve fully, allows himself to fall against him. It's all Steve can do to catch his weight, pull him into a hug, supporting his torso with one hand, and the back of his head with the other. Bucky breathes against Steve's shoulder. Steve thinks he can feel his breath catch, too. He hasn't seen Bucky cry once since he came back, he realizes.

“You're not crazy,” Steve says, and holds him steady, swaying gently. There's the memory of a song welling up, _The pipes, the pipes are calling_ , but Steve couldn't sing it now if he tried.

Steve thinks of the trials still ahead, the bright light of witness stands, the journalists’ questions, the judges. These days everyone seems to have a verdict on them, on the internet or elsewhere. _What is the precise nature of your relationship with…_

Holding him now, and knowing the work the Hawleys did, rectifying most of the press' damage with a righteous fury that has long burned out in Steve, Steve knows there is a chance. There's always a chance. If the world could only see Bucky like he does right now, soft and yielding, they'd have no choice but to love him like he does, like they love all of their big tragedies. He's been theirs, too, for a very long time, their legend lost and found again. This is a love story, after all. The kindling of hope feels new and unsettling in Steve’s chest, he knows the treacherous nature of it, but then, when it comes down to it, he is still nothing but human, and hope is all he’s got on his side, with the shield and the suit gone. Hope, and a voice, and a story to tell so long it fills an entire binder of ruled paper.

“I'll stand by you,” he whispers into Bucky's hair. “I'll fight for you, whatever it takes.”

And that's when Bucky kisses him, sudden and soft, and it lights a fuse inside of Steve that sets his whole body on fire. Bucky holds on to Steve's head and kisses him like there wasn't people watching, like he had all the time in the world. His fingers dig into Steve's neck, and Steve grabs a hold of Bucky's hair as good as he can, and he can feel Bucky smile into his mouth before he breaks away for air.

Bucky looks at him, his eyes reddened and dark, his hands still clasped around Steve's neck, so close, their foreheads touching. Steve feels flushed and jittery, but this time it's not nerves.

“You'll fight this war with me, Rogers?” Bucky asks, and Steve nods, and can't help but smile with Bucky. The relief on his face is contagious.

“I did say _everything_ , didn't I?” Steve says.

And Bucky kisses him again, slow this time, with purpose.

“I thought you meant only the dirty stuff,” Bucky says against Steve lips.

“Shut up, Buck,” Steve says, and kisses Bucky, every nerve ending exposed, his heart beating in his throat. Steve wonders briely if he'll ever get used to this, and finds himself hoping he won't. There's nothing like it, after all, life rushing through his veins, amplified and dizzying. Bucky's mouth against his lips, smiling. There's nothing like them, either, finally colliding, finally together.

Finally here, now.

 

 

\--- THE END ---

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's it, pals, it's been a blast. Thank you so much for reading, commenting and leaving kudos. I honestly didn't think anyone still cared... so thanks for making me feel like a little less of a freak. No shame!


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